An objective truth does not evolve. Beliefs do. No matter how much one can believe in "science," meditation will not cure a H. pylori infection. It doesn't matter how many experts tell you it will.
I actually did guess, 20 to 25 years ago, that the 1st Amendment's free-speech guarantee _might_ become passe on the American progressive left. It was a question that I wondered and worried about fairly often during that period, though mostly quietly to myself because nobody else I lived or worked with thought it was anything but a ridiculous thought. I now would like to go back to only wondering and worrying about it.
So, is it just impossible that of that the vast majority of those who report a COVID vaccine fatality in their household just straight up lied to the pollster? Because that was my initial interpretation of the result.
Seems less likely than the other possibilities, most polls, even on highly politically charged topics, don't have that many liars. I'm hoping to put a similar question in the ACX survey and see what happens (eg whether dumber / less informed people are less likely to say yes, or whether die-hard anti-lockdown Republicans are more likely to say yes, or what)
I wonder if there is motivated reasoning about causes of death? That is, some people might assume that a death was due to the vaccine because it came some time after the deceased was vaccinated, even though no medical professional believes it and something else is on the death certificate.
I also wonder what the base rate is: how many people would we expect to be in the same household as someone who died, of any cause? And how much higher was that number during the pandemic?
(This is a reminder that surveys are a cursed instrument, because nobody can ask people what they meant when they answered a certain way. So we are reduced to speculating.)
Your refreshing and timely reminder that surveys are a very imperfect method of data collection is appreciated.
So many people seem to attribute god-like powers of accuracy and insight to survey results, when both the data collection and data interpretation are subject to spectacular levels of inaccuracy, even assuming everyone involved is acting in good faith.
I agree. I think a more likely explanation is that many people are choosing to attribute deaths to the vaccine that are not actually from the vaccine. For example, let's say Person A gets vaccinated and dies shortly after of some completely unrelated cause. And let's say Person B, the loved one being polled, has priors about vaccines or the medical establishment or whatever that cause them to be convinced it was actually the vaccine that killed Person A.
In hypothetical reality, Person A lived a rather unhealthy lifestyle, had lots of risk factors for a heart attack, and would have died from a heart attack, regardless of whether they'd gotten the vaccine. Then, when Person A does, indeed, die of a heart attack, and by sheer coincidence had recently gotten vaccinated, Person B blames the COVID vaccine when polled, but it wasn't really the vaccine that killed their loved one. It might be easier to believe that outside forces (like a vaccine) harmed the person than to believe that the loved one's own actions did (like a poor lifestyle, not taking their meds, etc.).
That's only one example, but I think the underlying dynamic could easily explain the poll results.
> And let's say Person B, the loved one being polled, has priors about vaccines or the medical establishment or whatever that cause them to be convinced it was actually the vaccine that killed Person A.
Are those priors common enough to account for this? (I really have no intuition about how common they are.) Like, millions of Americans think it's likely that their deceased loved ones died of a vaccine, because they think vaccines are dangerous enough that that's pretty plausible?
That doesn't explain the enormous number. One in six Americans have a relative that died just then? Even if every death for a full year was blamed on it, that still seems too high.
That doesn't explain the enormous number. One in six Americans have a relative that died just then? Even if every death for a full year was blamed on it, that still seems too high.
> 3.5% of people polled say that someone in their household died of COVID, but 7.9% said someone in their family died from getting the COVID vaccine.
First, I note that this seems to be comparing two different things. My uncle (who died of/with Covid) is in my family (former legal guardian!) but not in my household.
Second, I agree. While it's not a direct example of this phenomenon, I want to discuss my uncle's case. One morning he was at least mildly ill and had incontinence. But he went out gardening, and collapsed. Passers-by saw it and called 911; the ambulance took him away just as his wife realized what was happening. He was unvaccinated and at the hospital he tested positive for Covid, after which his wife was not allowed to visit. Later he was placed on a ventilator and had a brain scan, which showed evidence of a stroke (I wasn't told the order or timing of these two events).
Then he died, and the doctors blamed Covid. His conservative anti-Covid-vax wife seemed uncertain whether Covid or the stroke killed him, and his rabidly conservative anti-Covid-vax brother (my father) blamed the stroke, and the doctors who preferred to treat the Covid instead. I suggested to my aunt to fill out a form to get clarifying information, but she repeatedly declined. Fun fact, my father also told me I was wrong when I said that the CDC said that people in his age group had a 7% chance of dying of Covid (I asked why he didn't claim the CDC was wrong instead of me, but he refuses to answer any/all of my questions about Covid/vaccines.)
People see what they want to see.
Edit: though I feel like a bigger part of the explanation comes from another comment by Zack:
> Of these 36 respondents, 20 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from the vaccine and "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" I'm skeptical that 55% of people who had a household member die of a vaccine would plan to get the vaccine themselves.
> [...] there seems to be a broader issue with the survey design. [...] 40 people completed the survey in 17 seconds or less. I'm skeptical it's possible for someone to provide a quality response to the survey that quickly. 225 people (nearly half) completed the survey in less than 31 seconds. I think that's the fastest I could answer if I were seeing the questions for the first time.
I heard a lot of stories early in the pandemic about people becoming irate that their loved one’s cause of death was listed as COVID and not a preexisting or underlying condition. I didn’t really understand this sentiment, but it demonstrates how “cause of death” is not as clear cut as we might like and could be a data point where hospital records or surveys might differ without either being genuinely false.
I have an uncle who got really sick in a really weird way immediately (within a few days) after getting vaccinated. This was news in the family because he had been skeptical of the vaccine but was eventually convinced it was safe and he should take it.
I would have had a tough time answering the question on the survey if he had died (thankfully he didn't!), because there's obvious reason to look at the vaccine, but it would be conjecture that wasn't based on anything specific. Strong correlation, limited causation. My priors on the question would probably dominate my response - if I was concerned about the vaccine causing deaths, I would likely have reported a death from vaccines. If not, then I would have said no.
In general, it seems like when you ask a factual question with partisan/CW valence on a poll, and the respondents don't know much about the factual question, they answer the "whose side are you on" question instead. That is, if you ask Republican-voting biologists, they'll nearly all tell you the Theory of Evolution is basically how living stuff came to be, but if you ask Republican-voting normies whose vaguely-remembered high school biology class may have mentioned Darwin a few times, they'll answer that evolution is a lie--they don't really know one way or another, they're just answering the "whose side are you on" question. Democratic normies will far more often tell you evolution is true, but probably could do little better in explaining why than the Republican normies could in explaining why evolution is really an atheist lie of some kind.
I wonder if this was happening with the poll here? It seems like a bizarre result.
I wonder if it would be possible to sprinkle in two or three objectively correct questions, such that if they were answered wrong the results of the survey might be removed as tainted. For example; Pew Research had a survey about classic liberals where they only chose results from people who gave a definition-conforming description of what a classic liberal was in a multiple choice question.
But it's very rare for pollsters to ask questions about how objectively well informed respondents are, and even rarer for them to disqualify the ignorant because that can increase the need for sample size, which is costly.
Depending on the quality of polling, satisficing behavior on polling is a strong default assumption for weird/dumb results on a survey, and depending on how they did panel sourcing, it's a problem that's increased over time. (See this link for a more in depth discussion, as well as a discussion of how some pollsters combat it in their survey design: https://www.civisanalytics.com/blog/understanding-satisficers/ )
Interestingly, I ran into someone at a coffee shop several months ago claiming to be a nurse who reported to the barista that her husband died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease disease spread by prions in a vaccine. She said didn't dare warn anyone at work because of "pressure." The barista tried to rope me into the conversation, but I just replied awkwardly that it was sad and left as quickly as possible!
I suspect that her husband had in fact died (since prion diseases are caused by misfolded self-proteins, they can spontaneously develop -- see Fatal Familial or Fatal Sporadic insomnia) and she misattributed his death to the vaccine due to a severe case of grief and too much online politics. Or perhaps she had schizophrenia and was disconnected from reality?
It was all very surreal.
At any rate, I wouldn't wholly discount the idea that a good portion of those results come from people misinterpreting real deaths.
Covid did weird thing to the health system. The EMS organizations I volunteer with noted that 911 calls were down. Cynically, we and the Emergency Departments all concluded that "people actually do know what the ER is for, they just didn't care until now".
And then we started looking at the numbers and found out that we were seeing far fewer strokes and heart attacks, either in-progress or after death. Maybe it was just a statistical anomaly for us.
Another possibility is that people included not just those people who were in their household but had a personal connection to. And this easily gets out of hand, much as most peoples' friends having more friends than they do. So if you have someone who dies of a stroke or heart attack (and in their mind clot = vaccine complication), and they have 3 household members, 8 neighbors, a few good friends, and a dozen family members, you are getting a lot of amplification based on the network effect.
I would think some respondents would stretch the definition of "have died from the vaccine", I have a family member who died of a heart attack five months after their 3rd shot, the anti-vax members of my family all swear it was because of the vaccine.
There seems to be a conflation here, reading the above it says around 3% said in their *household* but around 8% said in their *family*.
"Household" is "me, my partner (if any) and kids (if any)". People answering that question probably really do know if it was the vaccine or not.
"Family" could be Elderly Parents not living with me, Granny Sue, Uncle George, Cousin Ida, Bill's sister-in-law, Jane's nephew's aunt on his dad's side, etc. A lot of people could have gotten sick and died of other things/died of natural causes after getting the Covid vaccine.
People thinking "Well I read all this stuff in the papers about how people were dying after getting the vaccine, and Cousin Ida got the vaccine and got real sick and then she died a while later so yeah maybe it was the vaccine" answering "yes" to "did anyone in your family die?", when really Ida died of her long-standing kidney problems etc.
I’ll have a read. I agree with Kirsch about a whole lot (the conduct of the public health authorities & the drug companies was and remains despicable), but I’ll venture a guess:
Given his subject matter, a large proportion of his audience are likely to be engaging with his content on the basis of their own experience (or that of loved ones) with vaccines, whether or not you believe them. So you’re naturally going to get a disproportionate number answering that way.
One look at VAERS, a notoriously under-reported database, should suggest there’s been excessive number of adverse events. This is confirmed by the group-life insurance numbers and the success of funeral-related companies of late, both of which are post-2020 phenomena (which cripples the official contention that it’s all fallout from COVID-19—hordes of millennials weren’t dying in 2020). The Pfizer documents (and the fact that they wanted to hide them for the better part of the century) undergird this alternative explanation.
It’s arguably not enough evidence for proof, but it’s enough to discard the official line, and it’s enough that a real investigation should be mandatory. Simultaneously, we can look at efficacy. Have we seen just how ineffective these vaccines have been?
Pfizer and Moderna knew this; they gave out dangerous dosages just to get it to work long enough to fake the trials. Even at peak efficacy, which was many strains and years ago, it was gone in months and it was and still is rebounding into negative efficacy (and it’s dose-dependent, which is an ominous sign for defenders).
“Safe & effective” has been of the biggest lies of the past few years, but I’m fully prepared to show you a long list of them complete with the evidence to the contrary.
Because excess deaths start rising at the same time vaccinations do, in multiple countries. Whilst the old chestnut 'correlation doesn't equal causation' is correct, there is often no correlation at all with Covid itself. Instead, we are told excess deaths are delayed effects from Covid. Maybe, I'm not ruling it out but I think it is disingenuous to not even consider vaccine deaths as the cause. We know they have happened (whilst official numbers are small, VAERS & Yellow Card show them to be much higher) and we know doctor's are unlikely to report vaccine deaths unless there is an obvious and direct link.
"Because excess deaths start rising at the same time vaccinations do, in multiple countries."
Can you provide some backstory that I must be missing (e.g. we are only talking about 19-29 year olds or something ... your millennials comment suggests thi )? Because excess deaths in California began rising in April 2020. Is the claim that for a specific age group the excess deaths didn't rise until sometime after the vaccines became available?
I don't know about other countries, but in the U.S. there have been statistically excessive deaths from all causes during most weeks since the end of March 2020:
To anyone familiar with recent events, the major increases and decreases of excess deaths from any cause correlates closely with the rise and fall of covid cases a few weeks before.
They must have misheard *because* it isn’t borne out by facts. You know what else is not borne out by facts? Lies, hoaxes, and most often CONFABULATIONS. These aren’t lies because the person uttering it believes it to be true. For example the widespread instances of “furries” in schools (kids who “transitioned” into being animals and were accommodated by schools who didn’t want to be viewed as discriminatory so they provided litter boxes. Great story - even repeated by Joe Rogan - except it wasn’t true!) Do you have any idea how many anti-Vaxxers swear they had a friend or relative who got autism from vaccines? Same thing is going on with Covid deaths. Stop pretending all misinformation is basically the same!
I took a time-boxed peek at the Pollfish data. The 1500 results were splint into 3 batches of 500. I arbitrarily selected the Jul 4 file to look at.
In that file, there were 36 respondents who reported a household member had died from he vaccine.
Focusing on those responses, I noticed a few interesting patterns.
Of those 36 respondents, 10 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from COVID and death of a household member from the vaccine. I'm skeptical that 10 out of 500 people were unfortunate enough to have 2 household members die: one from COVID and one from the vaccine. (Especially because these are not large households; 4 of these 10 report that they have 1 other household member, and 5 of these 10 report having 2-4 other household members.)
Of these 36 respondents, 20 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from the vaccine and "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" I'm skeptical that 55% of people who had a household member die of a vaccine would plan to get the vaccine themselves.
Of these 36 respondents, there are even 4 who experienced a surprising number of adverse affects from the vaccine (Myocarditis, Pericarditis, AND Bell's Palsy ) requiring hospitalization in addition to having a household member die from the vaccine. Of these 4, 2 selected all of the following: "It will likely shorten my lifespan", "I am now unable to hold a job", "I am now unable to work a full day", "It impacts my personal life", "It is a minor annoyance". Those two are planning to get the vaccine again.
There's some overlap between these respondents. Ignoring all of them drops from 36 who had a household member die of the vaccine to 12. I don't see obvious inconsistencies in these responses.
However, there seems to be a broader issue with the survey design. They look at average time to complete each question, but average doesn't seem like the right measure here (3 people took 10+ minutes to answer; summed, the fastest 250 responses took about as long as those slowest 3). Of the 500 responses, most people seem to answer 7-10 questions. I timed myself just reading those questions silently in my head (not thinking about the answers). Of three attempts, my fastest was a bit over 17 seconds. 40 people completed the survey in 17 seconds or less. I'm skeptical it's possible for someone to provide a quality response to the survey that quickly. 225 people (nearly half) completed the survey in less than 31 seconds. I think that's the fastest I could answer if I were seeing the questions for the first time.
It seems like Pollfish's model may encourage hasty, poor quality responses; "Pollfish uses non-monetary incentives like an extra life in a game or access to premium content." (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-the-pollfish-methodology-works/) It seems like that creates a misalignment of incentives; the respondent is in a hurry to get back to whatever they were doing. They provide survey fraud protection, and claim it filters suspiciously quick or suspiciously consistent answers (e.g., the same answer for all questions), but it seems to be overlooking obviously problematic responses in this case. (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-pollfish-prevents-fraudulent-responses/)
My guess was that Kirsch very carefully structured the survey's target population to have more antivaxxers, and then declined to mention this. I didn't find a way to confirm or refute this in the limited time I spent.
Looking at the june 30 data, nothing fishy jumps out at me for my hypothesis.
I checked your hypothesis and it matches pretty well- when I divide the response time by the number of answered questions, the median rate was 1 question per 4.3 seconds. Almost 75% answered in under 6 seconds per q, and about 25% took under 3.3 seconds per q.
Thanks for looking into this. I love the idea of this person whom the vaccine put in the hospital with Bell's palsy, left them unable to work, *killed* a family member, and yet they can't wait to schedule their next dose.
Thanks for writing this up! I also took a look at the data and found similar issues. Came back to write it up & was happy to see that you'd already done so (& had dived deeper than I had). I can at least confirm that the Jun 30 results are similarly bizarre.
Although, from that article, an additional 7% are “lizardmen-adjacent,” (“of note, an additional 7% of Americans are “not sure” whether lizardmen are running the Earth or not,”) so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My guess is that a big chunk of those people understood the question as "Do you have anyone in your house who died after they got the COVID vaccine?" instead of "from the COVID vaccine," or instead of mishearing it.
I think people interpreting the question broadly, as in 'do you know of anyone who died of the covid vaccine?', and then basing their response on some viral facebook post they saw, is more likely. I personally know several people who said they 'knew' someone who died of the vaccine, and cited something like that.
It struck me that way too. I checked the data from the survey (there are some links elsewhere in the thread; you can also find it by following links in the article) and checked the first third of the poll's responses (500 of 1500). 45 of those 500 respondents (9%) answered Yes to "Did anyone else in your household die from the COVID vaccine?"
I looked through the dataset for anything that might give me insight into those cases. Of the 45 respondents mentioned above, 22 answered Yes, 5 answered Unsure, and 18 answered No to "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" which was also in the poll. Your priors may cause you to disagree with this, but I believe that if 50% of the people who answered that a household member died from the Covid vaccine also answered that they intend to get another Covid vaccine, then something about the data is inaccurate.
Also note, Scott says the Daily Sceptic didn't do a sanity check of the poll. But their article has a paragraph that does exactly that.
> The proportion of people in this poll reporting serious vaccine injury is considerably higher than in similar surveys, by a factor of 10 or more, the reason for which is unclear and needs to be investigated. We can do a sense check: there are around 120 million households in the U.S. If 3.6% of them have had a Covid death (as per the survey) then that would give 4.3 million Covid deaths. Official figures show around 1 million Covid deaths in the U.S. This suggests the survey is exaggerating results, perhaps due to a self-selection bias among those who respond.
>
> Nonetheless, these are what the respondents to this poll have reported and should not be quickly dismissed. Governments should be doing far more to look into why polls of the general public – not just this one but those by governments themselves – find high proportions of vaccine recipients reporting serious, debilitating and fatal reactions to the vaccines that governments insist are safe.
Are you seriously suggesting that people don't misunderstand questions, and that some questions are more likely to be misunderstood than others based on people's priors?
My unwritten response to the first post was "Isn't this something obvious that we already know?" I half remember you having written on the topic years ago. That the media lies by means other than straight up fabricating empirically untrue things is so obvious to be not worth mentioning.
Looking at what the media does and declaring that it doesn't lie is however much like having a model of unhealthy eating which only defining having candy as being unhealthy and declaring the person who eats 4 double cheese burgers a day as technically healthy. It misses the point entirely. If someone knows the truth and constructs what they espouse carefully to get people to believe something else they are doing the thing we don't like about lying.
I think maybe the headspace of most people is that a lie isn’t a specific thing about giving a false fact but rather a false or misleading worldview. Then they just reject the nuance. Media is factual and full of lies isn’t a contradiction in that use case.
This is also how I tend to see it as well. It’s interesting that the limits of large organizations seem to stop at being, mostly, factual but for whatever reason can’t produce helpful or clarifying context at scale.
I’m in favor of a decentralized editor type of system where all these stories can be challenged and adjudicated through adversarial challenge. That’s the only way I have ever conceived of where you could force right behavior.
Scott, I heartily echo what you say here. In 2019 I tried researching every bit of news I suspected was fake. It took a TON of time. Most of it turned out as you've said – factually true, but out of context (or sometimes completely true).
As a logic teacher, I appreciate your pointing out that we mostly lean on our priors when we evaluate “fakeness.” But I’m also uneasy about that, for the following reason.
My priors took a hit from the mother of all reality bombs 3 years ago. I’d heard for years, from questionable sources, that the government in China was harvesting organs from political prisoners. The story went that the Chinese Communist Party was rounding up minorities & dissidents in concentration camps, picking out the healthiest, and killing them for organ transplants – with or without anesthesia. By “questionable sources,” I mean elderly Asian people holding cardboard signs on street corners in the major city where I lived. They’d walk up to people and try, in broken English, to get signatures to stop the organ harvesting. I don't usually believe people with signs on street corners, so I always ignored them.
But fact-checking media is a pain. “I’ll go straight to the sources,” I thought. I booked appointments at the university with (1) a former ambassador to China, and (2) a professor from mainland China who specialized in CCP operations.
The results were shocking. Both the professor and the ambassador said the same thing. The worst was true. The CCP had been murdering for organs for about 20 years. The CCP put dissidents in concentration camps at massive rates. The healthiest prisoners were usually religious, from a group called the Falun Gong (indigenous Chinese), though there were also lots of Uighurs and Tibetans and house Christians. And the governments in the West had known all along. Political leaders, mainstream media, international corporations – they all knew. Democrats knew. Republicans knew. Bush knew. Obama knew. Everyone in a position to know, knew.
“Why hasn’t anyone kicked up a fuss?” I demanded. “This is outrageous!”
Both of them gave the same answer. Business interests. China is the world’s biggest trading partner. If you make the CCP mad by airing its dirty laundry, it will cut off your business relationships and bank accounts, after stealing your trade secrets. If you tell the American public about it, they’ll get mad and refuse to buy Made in China, and instead want Made in America or something else both ethical and inconvenient for large corporations.
These revelations destroyed my world. They were much more outrageous than anything in the fake news. If our elites were actually Lizard People, they couldn’t have more scales between their toes. It wasn't just one person like Obama or Bush making a cold-blooded decision to ignore things worse than Hitler. It was an entire bipartisan sub-culture at the highest levels of our political, corporate, and journalistic classes, cooperating with and actively suppressing news about horrors as bad as the Holocaust, for financial reasons.
I mean the comparison with the Holocaust. Numbers-wise, the CCP is almost on par with the Nazis. The UN estimates 1 million prisoners in concentration camps in Xinjiang alone (recent overview of the UN report here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-un-idUSKBN1KV1SU). But the Nazis genuinely seem not to have gotten into cannibalizing the organs of their enemies. Also, they didn’t really get into torturing people to death slowly with blood and gore. They liked the clean efficiency of gas chambers and ovens. But the CCP is strapping live humans to a stretcher, conscious and without painkiller, while a surgeon cuts out a fresh lung.
And even now, in almost 2023, most of our Western elite are just shrugging and going along with this.
This totally explodes the reliability of our priors regarding geopolitical realities. We were kept in the dark about THIS for 20 years. How much else are we in the dark about?
Did the CCP intentionally create Covid in a lab and then leak it? My priors alone are no help here. Except to say: Why not? They’ve been doing worse things for 20 years. I’d have to actually research the issue to find out.
Did the US government collude with Big Pharma to produce a rushed-and-ineffective Covid vaccine that would make them a billion dollars but that might accidentally end up killing more people than it helped? Why not? They’ve been colluding with worse-than-Hitler for 20 years to make a billion dollars. My priors are of no help here. I’d have to actually research the issue to find out.
Did a small cadre of Democrats steal the 2020 election? Why not? Both Democrats and Republicans have been colluding with worse-than-Hitler for 20 years. Why would they suddenly get all fair-and-ethical over elections at home? My priors are no help here. Etc.
Has the media been running cover for all this? Why not? They’ve been running cover for worse-than-Hitler for 20 years. Etc…
So our priors are no help. But before getting too paranoid, I should point out that this is why I read your blog. It's why your work here is so crucial. It’s not just that you do deep dives on these types of issues. You show *how* to do the deep dives. You're a master of identifying your own priors (and ours) and then looking at the data from all angles. And we all learn not just what to think but how to do it. That skill is what we need more of, in our current messes.
Also – please get involved with ending organ harvesting in China. This is my cardboard sign on the street corner of Astral Codex Ten.
Well this is... disturbing. I will say though that it seems like you may be conflating "number of Uighurs et al in forced camps" with "number of people China has killed and had their organs harvested". Could you share some of your more solid english-language sources on this?
I was extremely disturbed by this as well. My understanding is that the use of harvested organs has now stopped or at least greatly diminished. There was noise about it at the time, and I think it became clear that it couldn't go on.
If you start digging into Chinese horrors, though, it's only going to get worse. Forced late term abortions were carried out openly for decades.
As someone who lives here and tries to maintain some psychological balance, I think that most of the worst excesses have improved, with the occupation of Xinjiang being the obvious move in the wrong direction.
"If you tell the American public about it, they’ll get mad and refuse to buy Made in China, and instead want Made in America or something else both ethical and inconvenient for large corporations."
Why would it be inconvenient to, e.g., the editorial staff of the New York Times for the American public to refuse to buy Made in China? Or, if not the New York Times, some second-tier reputable newspaper wanting to move up by breaking a new story. It might be inconvenient to a lot of large corporations that *aren't* primarily in the news business, but the people who own those corporations don't get to set the editorial policy of major newspapers.
I believe, but with only moderate confidence due to not having researched the matter more than casually and our not having e.g. a Scott Alexander deep dive into the subject, that:
In the recent past the Chinese government harvested organs from some number of prisoners, and this may be ongoing.
The fraction of prisoners who have their organs harvested is <<100%, so that "millions of political prisoners + organ harvesting = Holocaustian levels of mass murder" is false or at least unsupported
The evidence for much of this is squishy enough that it can't really be proven to the level that a major newspaper is going to want to risk a libel suit or the like over it.
I also don't much care, because millions of political prisoners in concentration camps, with or without organ harvesting, is sufficient to put China in first place for the "Evil Empire" of the 21st century (so far, and Putin is making his own bid for that title). But it's an Evil Empire with enough thermonuclear missiles that, again with or without the organ-harvesting, I'm not going to press for a crusade to vanquish this evil quite yet.
Well, North America has (potentially) been doing things much worse than Stalin or Hitler for some years now (though it depends what your model of the future is like).
And the various US-backed wars and coups since WW2 weren't great either, though Putin has probably managed to top them by now ?
For what it's worth, we have not been kept in the dark about this. I feel like because you live in a place where people have cardboard signs talking about this, you got a dose of skepticism that most people did not get. My impression is that most people have heard of this, and had no real reason to doubt it. It was a prime plot point in World War Z, for instance, that the zombie virus was able to spread so quickly because chinese organs are constantly making their way around the world, and that when china discovered the zombie virus and started doing research on the infected, the last step of the experiments would be to add them to the normal queue of organ harvesting.
It's not like World War Z was all that fringe a book, either.
My impression is that one of the reason this doesn't stop is because if trying to stop harvesting organs, we would stop having organs for transplants. That a lot of very rich people, who live in the sort of 'second world' countries, source their kidneys and corneas and hearts from this process. Or people who go to brazil for their surgery because it's cheaper, stuff like that.
This might just be my bias because this is how it was presented in a lot of the media articles I've read about this, though. It's sort of like the problem of slavery, yeah the slavers are awful people, but it's the demand for slaves incentivizes their behavior in the first place, and there's some degree of complicity outside china in that all those organs are going *somewhere* and if they stopped flowing, that loss would be felt.
strange! i saw all the China staff on normal media. it's just... part of my world view. people don't care about things far away from them. it's happen all the time. the Holocaust is actually good example - the most famous genocide, and nobody truly cared, except the victims. but even the victims (or their successors, actually) don't care enough about such things to avoid selling weapons to dictators who are doing some bad, bad shit in their countries.
people care a lot about their family and friends. less about their social group, ethnic group, other groups their belong to. we care very little about people we don't know far far away.
I think the pushback is largely related to different definitions of "lie".
Media outlets generally have a very specific belief that they are trying to instill in their readers for any given article -- they know what they want the takeaway to be. Often, the takeaway they are trying to leave their readers with is false. One can reasonably claim that setting out to make someone believe a false claim in this way is "lying", even if the means by which you do it doesn't involve directly stating any false factual claims.
I think the claim you're making is correct, but characterizing this behavior -- intentional, often grievous deception by means of context distortion and selective presentation -- as "not lying" seems overly generous. I think the correct top-line representation of this phenomenon is "the media lies all the time (asterix, their particular method of lying doesn't involve directly stating false claims)".
My exact issue is that this whole line of analysis is being extremely charitable to media of all stripes.
I see 'lying' as entailing more than just fabricating a false fact, and more about the *intent* of presenting information so as to mislead or misinform, especially in a way that causes the target to form a false belief that the speaker wants them to form.
In the broadest sense this can come down solely to how one *frames* the facts.
But the more central example is simply removing any and all context that might lead the listener to a conclusion that the speaker wants them to avoid, whilst emphasizing facts that support the conclusion, *even though you possess all the relevant information and could easily convey it.*
I think it's an ironic case of Scott doing exactly what he's accusing the media of doing (probably accidentally?). It's kind of a motte and bailey game everyone is playing.
"Media don't lie."
"They say false things all the time! What about X, Y, and Z?"
"Not technically a false statement!"
"But they were absolutely misleading. Can you say they're not lying when they say a ton of stuff that's effectively no different? The intent is to communicate false ideas to their audience."
"Sure, but they didn't say things that were technically incorrect. They may even have uncritically convinced themselves into believing these things, so it doesn't count."
"That's a very narrow definition of lying. It's the same broad claim, backed down to a narrow definition that you're saying the media are doing."
"Exactly! You're starting to get my point."
"Sure, but I expect more from you. I come here for better, more critical analysis and a more thorough interrogation of the breadth of the subject. You're not just some idiot off the street, you have a reputation to maintain that shouldn't be trying to hide headline statements behind dubious narrower claims."
"Same with the news! You're starting to get it?"
"No. I stopped having those expectations of the news years ago."
I would maybe agree if his point was to prove this to defend the media. He however ends each section with "this is awful, but not technically a lie" and at the end provides why this is important ("censorship of dumb evil news" is something people imagine is possible but actually isn't). The logic is, AFAICT:
If [media can be sorted into truth and lies] => censorship can work.
First one is false.
Ergo, second one is false.
The argument does not fall apart if we redefine lie, as "lie is hard to define" still makes the first argument false, and this second one is false.
Couldn't we summarize the whole point here as saying that the media rarely lie in a direct way, but often mislead by omitting relevant context, or choosing which information to report/not report, or by framing the available facts in a way that pushes forward a desired narrative? Because this is what I took from Scott's initial post.
And this is a problem for policing misinformation, because omitted relevant context, or misleading framing, is subjective and very different from actually saying stuff that isn't true.
When he posted the first essay on this I wondered if he was doing a bit where he presented some accurate facts without context or with misleading context and then would put forth a longer writing actually analyzing the issue in great detail. It would have been a clever transition.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt but it's interesting that he's seemingly coming in defense of a conclusion that sort of absolves the media outlets of 'wrongdoing' if only because he doesn't even posit that they might be *intending* to make the signal/noise ratio worse in order to keep their audience misinformed.
When it really shouldn't be difficult to say "if they have all the facts of the story available to them and fail to *accurately* report *ALL* the facts to their audience, that's probably bad."
I think he's making allowance for the probability that many of them are fooling themselves with motivated reasoning, isolated demands for rigor, and a host of other failure modes rationalists work hard to avoid (but still aren't perfect themselves at eliminating).
I also think he's right to assume many/most biased reporting believes the underlying ideas they push, even if that one reporter failed to find enough evidence to prove their point. It's so easy to fool yourself that this should be considered the default probably. (Hanlon's razor)
It's a harder problem when you have a bunch of people who sincerely believe the crap they manufacture. It's easier if you're opposed by actively evil people who act like villains from Captain Planet ("I'm dumping sludge into the river because I hate nature!"), But that's rarely the case.
With honest actors, you have to insist on better norms of reporting, but it's hard to get thousands of reporters to study the Sequences.
I'm not saying it's never the case that you're dealing with a malicious actor. I'm sure there are editors and sources who know what they're doing, and use gullible reporters to signal boost a narrative they want pushed. But I think most reporters more likely have bad epistemic habits. Bias is a strong drug, and many people take that drug every day.
As far as I understand these two articles, Scott is using a narrow definition of "lie" and is upfront about it. I just don't see Scott making the broad claim anywhere, which in my reading invalidates your argument. It's not motte-and-bailey when you shout every other paragraph "I'm talking about this specific bailey, I know you all want to confuse it with this motte but I'm really purposely talking about the bailey right here and not this or that motte!"
You might simply disagree that this is an article worth writing, but I will counter that "the media is often misleading" wouldn't make for a better one. Also, "this is not the article I think you should've written" is a different critique than "this article is wrong".
Most importantly, you may have missed the purpose of Scott's argument about the media rarely lying explicitly, which is to support the argument that you can't just implement some "good kind of censorship", as many people are imagining it, by simply censoring outright false reporting.
Minor point: I think you've inverted the terms motte and bailey. The motte is the tower (the narrow point you retreat to when challenged) and the bailey is the open space (broader idea that's more difficult to defend).
I read both posts, and I understood the points he was making just fine. I thought they were good points. Indeed, it was interesting that he challenged his readers to find examples of factual inaccuracy in news stories and they didn't find any significant examples.
However, Scott also complains that people object to his statement that "the media rarely lies". Scott gets to choose his own titles, and he seems to know he's making an insurance claim. Indeed, he subtitled the first post saying, "with a title like that, obviously I'll be making a very nitpicky technical point".
Scott seems to implicitly understand people will object to his characterization of the media as "rarely lying", even as he complains about it. I'm just pointing out that he should not use an overbroad term to refer to a very specific phenomenon, then complain that people interpret him as making an overbroad claim.
This isn't the same as saying, "well I'd have used a different title because of stylistic reasons". This is saying, "Your title doesn't match your data." This is why these posts feel wrong to do many of us. We have personally experienced media misleading us, repeating things they should know are wrong, not challenging outrageous claims with obvious context, etc. It's the same as lying. It is lying. So the statement, "the media rarely lies" is not correct. The narrow, nitpicky point is fine - indeed it's an important point, that is unfortunately overshadowed by a bad title.
The media lies all the time. The way Scott framed this whole discussion undermined the point he was trying to make.
It seems like any analysis of a problem has to start with establishing some ground facts. If we can all agree that the media aren't actually lying, then that opens other avenues for exploring how the public are being misled by the media.
Yeah. The definition of "lie" that I grew up with was "any communication with the intent to deceive." You can lie while telling the truth, as long as your purpose was to inculcate a false impression among your audience.
From defamation law, there's the concept of *reckless disregard for the truth*. Webster defines it as
> disregard of the truth or falsity of a defamatory statement by a person who is highly aware of its probable falsity or entertains serious doubts about its truth or when there are obvious reasons to doubt the veracity and accuracy of a source
In this case, the media (on all sides) is full of this--repeating statements that sound plausible if you ignore those obvious questions, not asking questions, closing your eyes to the obvious issues, all in service of pushing a message.
That's well over the line of what I would call a lie.
Remember that the oath a fact witness takes before testifying in Court is "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
I will freely admit that news outlets aren't testifying under oath, but it gets to the idea that when people have an *EXPECTATION* that the person is telling "the whole truth" and "nothing but the truth" then it is still, shall we say, *problematic* if the speaker omits truthful facts which were nonetheless relevant.
And since there's no cross-examining attorney available to push back and elicit the missing facts, the listener has little recourse other than doing their own research, which *defeats the point of listening to a news outlet in the first place.*
<3 to tomdhunt and Faceh. I made this point in another post, but you both did it better. "Deliberately misinforming" (for political purposes, for power, for money, etc.) might not be "making up stuff directly," but it is bad.
I get Scott's point, I just think the framing is ... off.
The problem is on the policy side. It would probably be practical to have a law which bans media organizations from publishing things which are false. The court system is set up to handle all sorts of factual disputes. "Did CNN claim Greenland was in the Southern Hemisphere?" is the kind of thing a court can address.
But trying to determine whether "enough" context was provided is a much thing to adjudicate.
Yes, I basically endorse Scott's further conclusions about the impossibility of regulating this by any practical bright-line rule (whether that be in the courts, the regulatory agencies, social media platforms, or whatever).
In practice, any agency that tries to suppress "disinformation" will end up allowing information that is congenial to that agency's political aims, and suppressing information that is contrary to them, with no regard for truth on either end.
So, suppose I'm trying to be honest and accurate in explaining something to someone. I have an existing set of beliefs which may be wrong but which I've arrived at with some care and think are likely right. (For example, that covid is bad to get, worse as you get older/fatter/sicker, that vaccines decrease your risk of dying or getting very sick from covid by quite a bit, that some treatments like paxlovid do the same, that covid vaccines are overall pretty safe, etc.).
Now, we can probably agree that I must not lie in service of conveying an accurate understanding--if tomorrow there's a paper that indicates that covid vaccines are more dangerous than covid for people under 20, I must not lie about what the paper says. But I have a choice about how much emphasis to give the paper--I can say "yes, there was one paper that said the vaccine was more dangerous than covid for very low-risk people, and that's possible, but weighing all the evidence, I think it's unlikely." Or I can not mention that paper at all and just talk about the CDC guidance. Or I can trumpet that paper and write a headline that says "COVID VACCINE A DEADLY THREAT, ALL IS LOST" with an article that links to some n=30 study with a p-value of 0.04 showing that under-20 recipients reported longer symptoms with the vaccine than covid[1].
There are a lot of ways to be misleading there. But there's also this difference between reporting the latest news and trying to report an accurate understanding of what's going on. I think I want both of these, but I want people to be clear about which they're doing.
There's another issue where I might have an agenda other than conveying an accurate understanding to you. Like, do I see my role as conveying my best understanding about covid to you, or convincing you to do what I think you should do, or supporting the public health authorities, or what? Those are all different goals. Is your role telling me what's what as best you can, or "responsible journalism" that ends up meaning misleading me in a good cause?
[1] To be fair, my 17 year old has been vaccinated three times and has had covid twice; he's gotten about as sick from the vaccine as from covid each time (aka, several days of feeling lousy and not wanting to get out of bed), and so isn't real excited about getting vaccinated again.
I thought Scott was mostly pushing pack against the idea that Infowars and NYT (or whatever hero and villain you want to pick in the media) were doing something categorically different, when really they are doing the same thing to different degrees.
Whether you choose to call anything misleading “lying” or define a lie as strictly an intentional statement of an untrue fact, it doesn’t really matter - essentially all media does the former frequently and the latter rarely.
Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed Kim Prather an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim in an interview in the LA Times that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection.
I think a lot of people don't separate in their minds the provable lies and the tricks meant to get people to believe untrue things. When I watch the John Oliver episode on the women's national team's compensation package for instance I know that everything he says on the topic is technically accurate but I come away feeling viscerally lied to because it is so clear that the presentation is intentionally not addressing even the most basic pushback.
I think it's more like "people care about technicalities in their favor, and don't care about technicalities that are not in their favor." Ordinary people who are intentionally deceiving someone will often play word games to make their statements technically true (which shows they're tracking the distinction and sometimes care) but people who have been deceived don't actually care about that defense. I suspect this "don't _technically_ lie" instinct may have evolved to make it harder for your victim to convince _others_ to punish you, rather than to make your victim less mad.
I think there's also an element of "However well I personally manage to defend myself against tricks, that's obviously the reasonable standard that everyone should meet. Therefore, tricks that work against me are evil, but if you fall for a trick that wouldn't work on me then it's your own fault for being foolish." A while ago in ACX comments, I complained about stores that set all their prices to end with 99 cents or put one crappy item on a huge discount so they can advertise "up to 90% off", and I got a bunch of people objecting that those things "aren't lying" (even though the stores are doing extra work for the sole purpose of tricking people). I suspect this is because people think of themselves as immune to such petty tricks (though most of them are wrong).
Of course, another plausible hypothesis is "a bunch of people have different opinions, and there's enough readers on this blog that a bunch of people will disagree with you no matter what you say."
This seems like a classic case where the readers who agree have no motivation to comment, so the comment section is biased towards the minority (?) who disagree.
That’s a good observation. I didn’t comment on that piece because when I saw he had defined lie in that way I didn’t really disagree other than to maybe feel it wasn’t a very helpful definition. Then again I’d do think the distinction was important.
The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things.
I consider it obvious, for a pedantically literal definition of "lying". But I also consider it useless, because a source that says pedantically literal things with such a perversely-chosen context that a reasonable person taking it as face value would come to a false conclusion is no improvement over a source that just makes up things that are literally false. And in almost all contexts, I use the word "lying" indistinguishably for both cases.
There are some mainstream media outlets that, outside of the most scissory subjects, I'm willing to take what they say at face value without e.g. skimming the relevant wikipedia page, skimming the "talk" section of the wikipedia page, and checking out some of the references from those. But that's the interesting and useful question - does a source provide information from which one can safely draw a conclusion without doing an independent mini-dive into the subject? Not, "does the particular method of their deception include pedantically literal falsehoods?", because if I have to research the matter to get the context right I'll discover the falsehoods along the way.
We never ever remember the original sensory input. Everybody trying to remember a time media misinformed just retrieved the already processed "they lied". It would take re-reading the original media with an effort on re-analyzing the content to realize that it was, in fact, "just" misinformation and not lie.
Same happened to me when I read the original article, I doubt anybody is immune. The trick is to be aware of how memories are encoded and realize that this kind of judgement call will always require reprocessing. You can't trust cached information for this.
To me it was obvious that the New York Times works this way, but I was a little surprised to learn that Infowars apparently meets that standard as well.
My model (although I didn't think too deeply about it) was that if a media is "sufficiently mainstream", if will avoid publishing outright lies, because many of its customers might stop buying it if they learned that outright lies were published.
But I assumed that there is a mindkilling threshold, where the majority of customers are crazy fanatics, and even if you show them that some specific information X was a lie, they will not care, because it was still an argument-soldier fighting for their side, and besides "who cares, they might have got this one tiny detail wrong, but the general picture is right". Also, people have a short memory; if in December 2022 you prove that something published in October 2022 was false, no one really cares anymore, because the important thing is the December 2022 news which (supposedly) is true.
This is a great example where someone points out some important feature of the world, and half the people hearing them respond with "That's a dirty lie!" and the other half with "Well, of course, everyone knows that!"
I understand what you mean, but no. Most people don't get the subtleties here. Worse, many people who do think they get the subtleties actually don't. The fact that think they do, however, makes it even less likely that they ever will.
It's hard to make people understand a phenomena when they are confident in their misunderstanding.
It is very much one thing to witness a thing and think you understand what happened, and a whole other thing to be a person who makes an account of a thing that can be reviewed by others.
To say that people only come up with a portion of things they consume is an understatement.
I like the cheeseburgers angle because it's a great analog to the decision to allow your confirmation bias and motivated reasoning to cause you to report misleading information
It feels good to lazily report whatever facts support your existing opinions. It feels *really* good. If you held a gun to the NYT reporter who said that most economists don't think school vouchers would improve test scores and said "Hi, what is the most accurate way to report this survey of economists, or else" they would probably succeed in including the fact that twice as many economists with a yes or no opinion said vouchers would help. And then the reporter would probably continue opposing vouchers for non test score reasons anyway
Similarly, if you went into a McDonalds and did the same with the request that the customers make an orderly path to the healthiest food within 20 minutes they would successfully all not eat four cheeseburgers that day. And then afterward they would continue to make food choices for reasons of physiological satisfaction and not think about whether they were eating healthy
In my opinion the most effective way to personally convince reporters to be more accurate would be to condescendingly talk about how their natural biases understandably led them to report on something in a misleading way. Appeal to their pride by letting them know you no longer have high expectations of them and they can't help it if they have made what is an obvious mistake to someone who is primarily motivated to not make those mistakes
A more likely solution is to stop thinking there's a button we can press on the media labelled "Willingly Be More Accurate". Develop systems of information with direct incentives for accuracy such as prediction markets
This is a whole lot of words to say “I define ‘lying by media’ exclusively as falsifying source material, while many/most other people include presentation of false claims derived from true statements to also be lying”
No, because I explained pretty clearly how I was defining it in the introduction to my previous post, and instead of saying that they disagreed with my definition, the commenters objected that my post was wrong.
That’s fair. It would have been better form for people to take issue with the, IMO, totally unreasonable definition. Maybe people just couldn’t grok that someone who usually writes about big concepts would be advancing an argument that hinges on a definition of “lying” that produces the dubious outcome “Alex Jones didn’t lie about Sandy Hopk”? I mean, we can define “up” such that apples fall upward from trees, but what’s the point?
Respectfully, if your interest was in how partial facts can be misrepresented to advance false conclusions, that would have been a more constructive thrust. I think you just hit the iceberg of people being very tired of being lied to, so explaining that the lies aren’t actually lies provoked... a response.
Part of the original point, which IMO justified the very narrow definition of lying, was that “lying by motivated interpretation” is much harder to police than “lying by using incorrect facts.” There's a sliding scale of egregiousness.
Another way of looking at it is that media has evolved to lie in a way that they can't or won't be punished for.
If they could get away with blatant falsehoods they would but those are too easy to call out and could lead to legal trouble so you get the squishier form of lying wherein one can't legally *prove* it a lie but can still epistemically view it as a falsehood.
More than that, which context is relevant and what framing is best for conveying an accurate understanding of the world depends a great deal on your starting beliefs. If there's a news article about a spike in murders in Chicago over the last two years, is it relevant to mention how the timing corresponds to the BLM riots in 2020, or is that adding misleading context that diverts readers from an accurate understanding of the world? Well, that depends on your underlying beliefs about the cause of the spike in murders, right? Or maybe on your beliefs about what facts or ideas should be entertained in public and what facts or ideas should not be entertained in public.
SailerCorp media links every report of a spike in urban murders with a discussion of George Floyd and the BLM protests.
KendiCorp media links every report of a spike in urban murders with a discussion of the long history of racism in law enforcement and the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining.
Which one is providing a misleading framing, and which one a useful one? Depends on your starting worldview. Along with having different agenda, Sailer and Kendi have different understandings of how the world works, which makes different context seem relevant for understanding current events.
I'd go with whichever one's worldview doesn't cause it to do near 180's on an issue when covering different events.
If Kendicorp wants to tie *everything* to a history of racism I guess they can, but when there's an increase in Anti-Semetic attacks occurring as well and they then choose to switch explanations *away* from racism because:
A) They have less sympathy for the victims; and
B) It turns out the perps tend to be minorities themselves
And so they can't even keep their 'understanding of how the world works' *internally* consistent, then clearly it is proper to question the validity of their reporting across the board.
So lets add onto the issue of lying, the media's consistent hypocrisy when it comes to proffering explanations, to the point where it *smacks* of bad faith.
KendiCorp suggests that the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining got ~40% worse from 2019-2021. Also, covid!
SailerCorp suggests that the 44% increase in black homicide deaths and the 38% increase in black motor vehicle accident deaths from 2019 to 2021 is likely related to the "racial reckoning" that was declared by the American Establishment in the days following George Floyd's death when our elites concluded, virtually unanimously and with few dissenting voices being heard, that African-Americans suffered mostly from too much policing.
I don't think Scott's definition is unreasonable at all. In fact, I would say it is the only reasonable definition we could possibly use in any adversarial context. It is essentially the definition we use in our courts. No one has ever been charged with perjury for presenting only the facts most helpful to their case and presenting the opponents facts in the most negative light. That's literally the attorney's job. I'm astounded this group of really smart readers and commenters could have such difficulty following this. I am left thinking that the emotional response to some of these topics overrides some peoples' critical reading faculties and leaves them temporarily unable to break things down into individual claims and evaluate the truth of each one individually if they know ahead of time that they reject the conclusion. It's like the underlying core belief of many people is that an overall falsehood can't be built from a bunch of true constituent parts. This is just self-evidently false though. Of course you can build false narrative from a collection of curated true facts and doing so doesn't make the individual facts untrue. I keep thinking of this is the mirror image of Trump supporters arguing that he was building a larger true narrative out of a bunch of individual lies.
That would imply that people should be expected to read the media the way an attorney listens to his opponent: by condensing the message to its pure facts, carefully searching for any maliciously inserted narrative.
Journalists are held to a higher standard than attorneys: they should present the story behind the facts as they actually understand it while transparently explaining that there are multiple views on how the individual facts make up a story. If a journalist deliberately fails to do so, it is not unreasonable to colloquially say that he's lying. It would be more precise to say "he's construction a false narrative", but (as the commenters have argued) everybody knows that people mean exactly that when they say that "the media is lying".
I would say that as a consumer of media your job is to evaluate media sources just like you would evaluate the presentation of an attorney as a juror. You should understand that each side has a viewpoint and an agenda which they are pushing and will marshal all the favorable facts and implications they can for their own side and paint the opponent’s side in the most negative light possible. As a juror you should be able to generally treat factual statements as factual and weigh the overall narratives of both sides against each other. I don’t think it helps the discussion to confuse false statements of fact with misleading narratives.
While I agree that media consumers should be expected to pay attention to false narratives, I cannot agree that it is morally right for journalists to construct a narrative the same way as a attorney rightly does.
The relationship between the media and readers is like the relationship between drivers on public streets: One driver (the reader) has to be ready to react to a mistake by another driver (a media outlet). This does not mean that it is ok for the second driver to make mistakes.
A additional take would be to concede that media organisations are supposed to have a slight bias to encourage a helpful diversity of viewpoints. But if their bis becomes too strong, they create false narratives and act immorally.
Agreed, journalists should be trusted no more than others and even if they are, their editors and publishers certainly have a viewpoint they wish to project. While I may align more closely to the New York Times I would never consider the paper unbiased.
Most of the commenters are focused on the definition of lying. That there is a debate about "what is a lie" reinforces what I believe is the whole point of the article, A notion that there is an objective truth standard which can be applied to media is futile. Even more fraught is the notion that some body (as is proposed on occasion in my country) can sift through and police "misinformation", well good luck with that,
"That would imply that people should be expected to read the media the way an attorney listens to his opponent: by condensing the message to its pure facts, carefully searching for any maliciously inserted narrative."
[serious bearded man face] Yes.
I mean, that is indeed the only correct way to approach the media (stray too far in one direction and you'll believe their, yes, lies - but stray too far in another and you won't be able to discern and believe anything about the world, ever), and our epistemic ecosystem would be much healthier if more people internalized this. Journalists, empirically, are not in fact being held to a higher standard than attorneys, they are in fact expected to present the story behind the facts in a way consistent with beliefs and interests of their principals', peers and customers. This has always been true in practice, but nowadays the media go as far as outright discarding even the theory of impartiality.
Subornation of perjury is definitely a thing, which is what happens when NPR publishes an impossible claim and then tacks on "NPR has been unable to verify these claims" (wasn't it journalistic malpractice to publish unverified stores at one point?)
And then there's the "known or should have known" or "reckless disregard for the truth" clauses.
Saying "it's not a lie if I didn't invent the lie, even though it's obviously a lie" get you to the point where you can just quote from The Protocols and say "what's the big deal?"
I still think the linguistic distinction Scott is drawing is useful, for a number of reasons. Other commenters do a good job re-summarizing Scott’s position, but imho, another reason is helping improve (if only slightly) the dialog among voices of the culture war.
Claiming an opposing viewpoint is constructed via lies is very likely to be the end of a discussion if the opposition is right in believing it’s not technically true.
Scott used the definition that was relevant to the point he was making about how any procedure for censoring lies is either mostly judgment calls or mostly useless.
And it's a definition that I encounter pretty often in ordinary life! It's definitely not the ONLY definition of "lying" that people use, but it's A definition that many people use pretty often. It's not like Scott is making this up out of the blue!
I think that by this standard *literally all statements about reality* are judgement calls. Some sources say the Earth is round, some sources say the Earth is flat, and who are we to make a judgement call about which one is correct? Unless you've personally launched into space to observe the Earth's curvature, all you're doing is gathering other sources and making judgement calls about their credibility.
So this seems like a really easy bullet to bite - yes, we are going to make judgement calls about which sources are truthful, and yes, we will not be 100% accurate in this process, but we will do it anyway because the alternative is a skepticism so radical that you can't even trust that the Earth is round.
I think there's been some sort of disconnect? Scott's whole point is that the media isn't usually going to make claims like "the earth is flat", they're going to make claims like "some sources say the earth is flat". Even if we can all agree that the earth is round, that doesn't answer the question of whether to censor people who say "some sources say the earth is flat", which is a true statement that is sometimes made by honest people (notice e.g. that you just made it).
Indeed, the greatest light from this thread, from Scott on down, may be that consistently thinking clearly is hard, and one thing not to do is to frame a somewhat contentious topic using a legalistic re-definition of words that people already think they know.
This whole topic would have been much less meta had Scott opted for a more rational framing; something like “even the most dishonest media rarely relies on objectively false data”. I’m sure that could be improved. With the best of intentions, Scott ended up asserting that any statement based on true source data cannot be a “lie”, and people reacted to that.
Scott's point is that false facts look like a bright line, such that you can sort facts into "true" and "false", outlaw people telling the false ones, and solve misinformation forever. But if the problem really is tendentious and misleading reporting, that is both a lot harder to decide and necessarily requires a process that's going to be highly vulnerable to corruption, due to being inherently subjective.
This is not a pro-lying argument, it's an anti-censorship argument.
That’s great, and I don’t disagree, and that is far more persuasive than Scott’s original piece. All I’m saying is that people, rightly or wrongly, get wound up about gaslighting. And coming at this from a “even the most blatant lies one sees in the media aren’t *really* lies” angle is necessarily going to be received as “nobody lied to you”
Okay, but the first line in Scott's original article was "With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point." I'm not sure how he could have been clearer that he's arguing that this presents difficulty for suppressing misinformation, not that he's trying to *exonerate Infowars.*
The very fact that so many people seem to be making this mistake suggests that Scott, in pointing to this phenomenon, is pointing to a conflation that is both very real and affects many among those who are smart and at least sympathetic to the rationalist framework.
Scott is pointing out that the problem with censorship and misinformation is that people conflate "false facts" type of lying (which is objective and relatively easy to then objectively counteract) with the "selective facts" type of lying, and in doing so, think that there can be some objective mechanism to do something like "remove misinformation" or "remove lying" from media. Cue a whole host of responses *which conflate both types of lying.*
I'm not sure if this is due to some artifact of the way Scott presented his case or if it really was a sort of "case in point" in the responses.
I think there's a very useful distinction to make between "misleading" and "lie" If everybody is using true facts to send a misleading message, then it's still possible for a savvy person to figure out what the truth probably is.
If they're outright falsifying material, it becomes much harder to do this.
I thought the thesis Scott laid out is pretty clear, and you either skimmed over it or willfully decided to misinterpret it because you have an emotional reaction to being told the media doesn't lie.
But it's a weak anti-censorship argument. If it were the true that detecting bad content were easy that would be a pro censorship argument. Good censorship arguments assume hard tradeoffs and edge cases and decides it's worth it even with false positives. If you start a slippery slope comparing Alex Jones sandy hook statements with bad polling then I'll just get off the slope after censoring Alex Jones.
I'm actually generally happy with moderation policies of tech companies (I don't always agree with them but I do think they do a reasonable job) and think both sides need to recognize that it's a hard task but while i support working the refs to fix bad edge cases I would resist calls to categorically reduce moderation. Your options aren't no censorship or Chinese levels of censorship.
I agree that censorship level is on a spectrum, but I hope you agree that it's dynamic over time. So your happiness is at best temporary. One day you'll be among the censored, and I predict you won't be equally pleased then. You don't even have to imagine how a Trump voter or a Russian speaker sees the current "moderation policies"; you can just recall yesterday's policies that banned depictions of gay love from all corners of polite society. Many people were also generally happy then, but that doesn't make it right.
Do you think there is more or less censorship than in the 90s? What I'm arguing is not that the things I think should be censored are censored and the topics I think shouldn't be censored aren't. Rather what I'm arguing is that the current process of having moderate censorship that evolves with societal understanding is preferable to either no moderation or china levels of censorship. I'd probably prefer 10% less moderation but not 50% less.
Who exactly is saying "the government is capable of 100% accurately separating fact from fiction?" Or "the government should outlaw all statements of falsehood and solve misinformation forever"?
This whole thing feels like a weakman - people are making fairly mild complaints like "Twitter has lots of obvious, Alex Jones-tier misinformation and I think they could do better at not spreading that around" and the response is "Oh, so you want the government to delete all lies from the internet at gunpoint? You think Twitter should become the Official Arbiter of Truth? Is that what you want?" No, we're saying that a private company should try to have good judgement about what sort of information it spreads, just like any other citizen or organization who shares things they hear about.
Is there an actual law about online misinformation that's being debated here? Do we have some actual lawyers who could weigh in on how to make such laws difficult to abuse? Or is the entirety of this argument just "nobody has 100% objective understanding of reality, therefore censorship is bad"?
People are saying "we want to run Alex Jones off the decent parts of the internet, because that guy just peddles pure misinformation and no decent person wants *that*". And they say that they're only going to do it against the evil Alex Jones types and it will be obvious who they are so we don't have to worry. But some of us are worried that the same people will then try to run e.g. Scott Alexander off the decent parts of the internet for his "pure misinformation".
At which point, the sort of person who wants it both ways, a nice pleasant internet experience with Scott Alexander but without Alex Jones anywhere in sight, start looking for some sort of "objective standard" that could be used to separate the two. And if you start trying to turn "misinformation" into a specific and objective standard, it's likely to be something like "stuff that can be proven to be factually untrue".
I think the number of people who A: genuinely want it both ways and C: share Scott's focus on the narrowly literal definition of "lie", is small enough that it's not going to matter to the outcome of that debate. But, at the margin, it is worth explaining to that crowd that even a "just don't literally lie" standard won't do what they expect it to.
The intent is to nuance the detail and debunk counterclaims, not to repeat what he already said in the first post... this post is for those who disagreed, and those wondering how to explain/debate it to someone who disagrees.
Perhaps some people are operating with a different conception of “lie” like “lead to believe falsehoods.” That’s the only reason I can think of to reject this, outside the “my opponents are evil liars” bias you propose.
I do have the impression that the objectors are inclined to label all media falsehoods as lies, but I can't believe they apply the same standard in their private lives. Possibly there's an unstated assumption that the media are omniscient?
If Albert comes to me and tell me "Bob is a rapist", refuse to elaborate and leave, and I start repeating to everyone I meet "Bob is a rapist" (maybe with a "Albert says" after), despite having made no effort to confirm the claim, nor having any indication that Albert was truthful, most people would consider me to be lying as well. They understand I'm not omniscient, they also understand that I'm a lying piece of shit for spreading baseless rumors.
I am increasingly under the suspicion that all value beliefs are downstream of factual beliefs; terminal values might not be all that different between people. It's like everyone wants a utopia, not a dystopia , (i.e. shared values) and simply disagree on what approach gets us there, and how close we can possibly get to it (i.e. different fact beliefs on like likelihood of various counterfactual scenarios following from each other)
This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me).
It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them.
This is an article about the phenomenon, which doesn't link to any examples, which is exactly the sort of thing I've learned to try to verify. Do you remember / have links to any of the fake articles themselves?
This definitely fits your definition of lying, although maybe it would be a stretch to call this website 'media' - where would you draw the line between 'a random person's blog' and 'media'?
Thank you, the Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo article is the first one in all these comments that I admit is definitely an example of the media lying. Good work!
(I wonder who this is aimed at, and whether anyone has ever believed it)
Sorry to be all over this thread. Super interesting discussion and fun comments section.
Wanted to echo that this was the original fake news phenomenon. And there were a lot of outlets created that gave readers the aesthetic impression that they were local news sites when they weren't. Even if the content was relatively truthful (uncertain) wasn't the intentionally misleading presentation a form of deception?
Thinking about it more, the difference between this and something like Infowars (or even the NYT) is probably less to do with credibility/prestige and more to do with size. Infowars has, afaik, a few dozen employees, so any article written would probably involve multiple people; based on the article you linked below realrawnews seems to be written by a single person. Maybe this argument more generally is "Groups of people can't coordinate to knowingly lie about something" - I can't think of any counterexamples off the top of my head, but maybe other people can think of some.
I think you'd want to be precise about who "the media" is - the sites involved in the original fake news phenomenon were an extension of those basically content-free SEO spam pages that pollute your Google search results sometimes. They would use the stylistic conventions of local news websites of the time, and they would get their traffic by having "articles" go viral on social media (or sometimes appearing in the targeted ads on actual publications' articles). But they were basically internet chaff - it's not like you would find any journalists saying they had worked there, or people in their putative markets saying they subscribe or regularly visit.
I didn't have this to hand, just got it from a bit of clicking around on the IRA. I didn't think it was controversial that Russia was engaging in an aggressive disinformation/psy-ops campaign around the 2016 election (the controversy was just about whether Trump was colluding with them).
My old employer BuzzFeed did an exposé on a news agency which ran (sometimes) literally made up stories, though even then they were more commonly embellished https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/central-european-news we were sued for libel but won the case
I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes.
I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money.
I'm not sure whether this is what you're looking for, but there were some articles about fake news factories cranking out fictional stories purely for the money, like https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/, with links to a couple more.
The most famous 2016 example of fake news (before Trump hijacked the phrase) was "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President". I don't know if this counts as "the media" lying because it was a hoax website masquerading as a news site ("WTOE 5 News") that has since been shut down. But the story spread like wildfire on Facebook:
I'm with you on the general point but I think you're being too charitable to InfoWars (and maybe others) in at least some examples.
Take the InfoWars birth certificate one: in addition to all the claims about layers and so on, it says "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax". That is a factual claim which is false. They offer support for that claim which isn't actually convincing, and the support they offer happens to be true but out of context, and I'm with you on calling the supporting evidence "not lies". But "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax" is in fact flatly false, and is asserted by the article itself, not just "someone said".
Disagree. They're stating their conclusion and the evidence that led to their conclusion. Their conclusion is wrong, but not a lie or "them making things up", just an incorrect inference.
If we are using the technical definition of "lie" whereby one must be making a false claim while knowing it is false, rather than making a false claim with reckless disregard for the truth, sure. But I think the second sense is the one people usually hold, and moreover most of the media does avoid lying in the second sense. InfoWars is genuinely unusual in that it does not. You can use the more usual definition of "lie" and still have your thesis hold for the media as a whole, just not for InfoWars in particular.
Using your definition we couldn't call anything a lie if there is any true fact offered in support of that claim. I don't think that's the usual definition.
Using your definition, it sounds like you're accusing me of lying in this post and making up my facts, since you believe my conclusion is false (even if I was well-intentioned). See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
Why would you want to expand the definition of "lie" so big that it includes unintentional errors in reasoning?
Do you see a distinction between making a definitive statement that is false (even if could have been arrived at honestly) vs. making a statement that is true but misleading? Since it seems to me that many of the InfoWars examples are the former while the mainstream media examples are the latter.
I think our disagreement is about definitions, not about facts in the world. And disagreements about definitions can't be lies (by definition).
But also, I don't think you've made a claim with reckless disregard for the truth, whereas I think InfoWars did. I am not at all convinced that InfoWars had a sincere belief that the birth certificate in question was a forgery. I think it is much more likely that they simply didn't care to know the truth of the matter. And I think it's reasonable to say that when someone makes it a false claim without caring whether or not it's true, that's a lie. This is the standard used for defamation in the US ("reckless disregard for the truth" is stock legal phrase), and defamation is usually understood to mean "lying about someone in a harmful way", so I think this is a pretty normal standard.
I'm not trying to expand the definition to unintentional errors in reasoning. I'm trying to use the to-me preexisting definition of "making a false claim without caring whether it's true".
I worry that you are using "reckless disregard for the truth" as what I described as "a be dumb and evil gear". I'm not super-invested in the claim that Infowars writers in particular believe their own conspiracy theories (though it seems plausible! Some people believe them! Why wouldn't those be the people who end up working at Infowars!), but I worry that everyone thinks their opponents have "reckless disregard for the truth", and that leaving that loophole means everyone gets to elide the difference between "my opponent is expressing an opinion" and "my opponent is literally lying".
My point here is that this isn't a loophole which would generalize beyond InfoWars, because everyone from the NYT to Fox News basically manages to avoid making false statements of fact in the first place - as you observe, they are careful to phrase things as "according to X" or to suggest a conclusion without actually asserting it. It's really only InfoWars in particular that actually outright makes false statements of fact. They are genuinely doing something different than the NYT or Fox here. Your thesis still holds when using my definition for the rest of the media except InfoWars.
And I note that the claim "InfoWars sincerely believes their false claims [and therefore is not lying by Scott's definition]" requires exactly the same level of insight into their mental state as "InfoWars makes false claims with reckless disregard for the truth [and therefore is lying by my definition]". So I don't see why we should believe they are definitely not lying (by your definition) if we aren't willing to speculate about their mental state. And if we are willing, I think evidence is in favor of "reckless disregard" here.
I don't think that any reasonable person would suggest you are reckless, whereas Infowars has a long history of recklessness. Not every unintentional error is reckless, but some of them certainly are.
I think that recklessness has some overlap with falling to attempt to validate sources or consider other explanations: again, not what you're doing here IMO.
I agree with most of the article. But I think there are two possible interpretations of "lying" (roughly, making false statements vs making intentionally false statements) and your original article makes it sound like you're saying the media rarely makes statements that are literally false.
> Still, on the most nitpicky level, as far as I can tell the article doesn’t say a lot which is literally false.
> But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts.
InfoWars probably honestly believed Obama's birth certificate was a hoax. If InfoWars instead said "we *uncovered evidence* that the new birth certificate is a hoax", I could see that as a potentially true statement. But while "New Obama birth certificate is a hoax" may be their honest opinion, it's also a false fact.
So maybe it's worth clarifying that when reporters do report false fact, it's an honest but mistaken belief (or at least plausibly so).
This also leads into a rather messy philosophical question on whether anything can be proved a lie, since we can't prove anything in the physical world with 100% certainty and we can't know someone's internal beliefs. Any statement is possibly true with enough conspiratorial thinking and the reporter could honestly believe it.
So if we're talking about how this applies to fact checking, we need some threshold at which we can reasonably say a claim is false, and I think "Obama's birth certificate is a forgery" meets that threshold. At least as much as any statement in the news can.
I strongly disagree that the distinction being drawn is between "known false" and "reckless disregard". The distinction being drawn is between "I claim to directly know this" and "this is an inference I am drawing from facts that you also know".
If they had said "based on the evidence and reasoning outlined in this article, I submit that this document is a shoddily contrived hoax," then that would be a true statement. If it's fairly obvious that's what they meant, then most impartial observers are not going to call them liars just because they worded it imprecisely.
(You may or may not consider this relevant, but that's also a legal standard for defamation. Conclusions based on true disclosed facts cannot count as defamation, even if the conclusions are both false and unreasonable.)
I did a double-take at the InfoWars one too. The difference between "asserting an obviously incorrect conclusion, drawn from specious, easily explicable evidence, to further ulterior motives" and "making something up" seems so vanishingly small as to be useless. Indeed, it seems like the only way something could truly be classified as a lie under this rubric is if one could know both a) the state of the purported liar's knowledge and b) their intent, which is of course impossible, so what's the point of having the concept of a lie at all? Wouldn't everyone accused of being a liar simply be able to say "that's what I believed" and, the accuser being unable to prove them wrong on that point, end the conversation?
I think all of "obviously", "easily explicable", and "to further ulterior motives" are you doing the "they're just being dumb and evil!" thing here. These things obviously aren't obvious to the people who get them wrong, or easily explicable to the people who fail to explain them.
And I think that's my point - for just about every incorrect statement one can make, there will be some group of people to whom it rings true. If every attempt to point out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or ulterior motives in the original statement can be dismissed as an ad hominem attack by *someone*, then there's no such thing as a lie, is there? Or at least, nothing that everyone can agree is a lie. Which seems pretty fundamental to the usefulness of lies as a concept, them being about truth and all.
I guess the larger point is that this pair of articles seems less about expanding our understanding about how the media operates, why framing matters, what the responsibilities of journalists and editors are, etc - all of which are very topical and interesting! - and more about contracting the definition of a lie such that practically no one can be said to be doing it.
If we restrict ourselves to controversial examples, it shouldn't be surprising that it's difficult to get consensus on what's a lie. If it were easy then they wouldn't be controversial.
But there are other examples where lying becomes sufficiently obvious and it's not controversial anymore. (Theranos is one example.)
Under Scott’s definition, there still is such a thing.
> and more about contracting the definition of a lie such that practically no one can be said to be doing it.
… and so yes, that’s exactly the point. I think this contraction is *useful* though. If it were more common that the media told outright lies, the national discussion regarding what media should do better would be rightfully simple: the media should stop lying.
As Scott points out though, it’s not that simple. The media is doing something more subtle (but admittedly just as bad), and so how we want the media to change is less straightforward. With the confusion around the definition of lying, the discussion about what the media should do differently too often simply stops at “the media should stop lying.”
How do we define a lie in terms of censorship so that we always get Infowars and don't get the NYT?
Infowars is lying in a casual sense of the term, I agree. But they are doing the same kind of thing as the NYT—they just do it more egregiously. But "more egregiously" is a value statement, based upon my analysis of the evidence, and therefore it's impossible to set it down in a law.
My point here is that "false statements made with reckless disregard for the truth" applies basically only to InfoWars. As Scott is pointing out, NYT and Fox and so on manage to avoid making false statements in the first place, by careful use of weasel words, and so cannot be lying according to this definition.
Who exactly is being censored here? Alex Jones and the NYT are both still on the air. One is considered more trustworthy by the general public and is consequently far more likely to get shared by other private citizens, but that's just "the marketplace of ideas" in action. Alex Jones only faced state punishment for a very specific lie - his claims that nobody died in Sandy Hook, and that the parents were crisis actors (resulting in concrete damages from the parents getting harassed).
"Reckless disregard for the truth" may be a judgement call, but it's a call that the legal system has a lot of practice making and it appears to reliably hit Infowars and not the NYT. Actually, it reliably passes both Infowars and the NYT most of the time and only rarely hits Infowars when they do something truly egregious.
I’ve always thought that the definition of “lie”requires intent. If my wife asks me if I cheated on her, and I say “no” (but actually did), then I am lying. If I get caught, then it is proven.
The use of “lie” in the media context seems to me like hyperbole. One side in the media war uses bad faith to accuse the other of lying, when they have drawn conclusions of such without evidence of mindset.
The best evidence of this to me is all the accusations that Trump lied to his followers that the election is stolen. I’ve seen no objective evidence for asserting that is a lie. When I ask people, they say that the AJ told him, or something like that. I think there is lots of evidence that Trump is somewhat stubborn in his beliefs and gravitates to some sources over others.
So, are these people lying when they say Trump lied? Probably not, as they may be having trouble conceiving that someone could believe that it is true that the election was stolen based on the information that they have read. They likely honestly believe he tried to dupe his followers. Maybe he did, but there is no evidence I’ve seen of it.
Trump was presented with true information and false information. He chose to repeat the false information. We could have a debate as to whether he was mentally incapable of assessing evidence or whether he intentionally lied. The defense "he is incapable of separating fact from fiction and has extreme confirmation bias" is impossible to disprove and has no detectable behavioral differences from "he's a pathological liar" so I don't know why you want to make that distinction.
The point is that it is really complicated to discern what is "true" and what is "false". Many things exist in a grey area. Personally, I tend to think in terms of likelihood that something is true to mitigate this. But much this likelihood is still fed by a priori beliefs and the bias that stems from them.
In Trump's world, he's been dealing with dirty trick (pee tape dossier) after dirty trick (suppression of the Hunter laptop) and has had numerous on the left calling him a Nazi. It would be reasonable to assume that if people think your a Nazi, they are probably willing to cheat to retain power. And that feeds into his bias and impacts what he believes is true and what isn't.
In Biden's world, he says that the event that made him want to seek office was when Trump called neo-Nazis "fine people". Any objective viewing of Trump's post-Charlottesville remarks indicate that this didn't happen. Was Biden lying? Maybe, but like Trump I give him the benefit of the doubt as in his a priori beliefs Trump is likely associated with white supremacy.
Two sides of the same coin. I want words to mean things. The word "lying" implies intent. It implies deceit. It is akin to fraud. By calling things lies that aren't proven to be so, we use a mix of hyperbole and mind reading to ascribe an ethical failing that otherwise wouldn't exist. It is dangerous as it turns normal cognitive functions into something malicious.
Even people with frequent confirmation bias, shouldn't be ascribed with an ethical failing (pathological liar). It makes disagreements toxic and throws up a barrier that makes it harder to truly understand people that you disagree with.
It takes a lot of work to challenge your bias and develop systems to mitigate them. As I didn't see evidence during the Trump era that someone as intelligent, thoughtful & well-schooled as Rachel Maddow was putting in that hard work - how can I expect better from Trump?
The problem is that you giving everyone the benefit of the doubt means that those with ill intent can take advantage of your forgiving nature very easily. You are bending over so far backwards to ascribe reasonable motives to Trump that you have defined the word "lying" out of existence. Nothing could possibly rise to the level of lying because no one can ever prove mal-intent.
Trump *is* a pathological liar. I can understand people I disagree with. Many people who have similar political beliefs to Trump have those beliefs honestly. Trump is not one of those people. He has committed financial fraud after financial fraud. He has lied directly to his supporters in order to scam them out of their money over and over. And he has told untold numbers of political lies from the banal (largest inauguration crowd ever) to the insidious (election fraud). Sure you can tell me that you ascribe good intentions to him all you want. But either he is a malicious liar or he is so disconnected from reality as to be psychotic. And his ability to function passably in society indicates to me that he is not psychotic.
As long as well-intentioned people like you and Scott obfuscate and dither about separating between people who are straight up lying and people who are telling half-truths, the people who are straight-up lying will be rewarded for their brazenness and others will copy their behavior.
Again, your insistence on intent when you put such an unreasonably high bar on the standard of proof that you expect, means that you have defined lying so narrowly as to be a contentless category. Or at the very least a category that no one can use without someone else claiming that intent was lacking in bad faith.
After listening to a bunch of episodes of the Breakdown podcast on the Trump grand-jury thing, I changed my mind from thinking he probably believed he was defrauded out of the presidency to thinking the opposite. So that might work for you too if you're interested in changing your mind on the matter.
A definition of lying that charitable to the person making the statement seems like it would prevent us from concluding nearly any written claim with at least some apparent support is a lie. If you mean the point of the article in this way, it seems to me to be likely true but somewhat unsurprising as a claim about the media. "We probably can't prove with high certainty that someone was lying unless they admit it" or something of that form.
Can you give an example of a piece of written work that you believe crosses the boundary into deliberate lying?
When I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that.
If later it turned out it *was* a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been *lying* when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning).
Jones states his own facts and the conclusion he infers from them. If his conclusion is wrong, the correct term for this wrongness is "failed inference", not "lying".
I hope we can all agree that the NYT wouldn't draw such big conclusions from such thin findings. The InfoWars birth certificate article doesn't even really seem internally certain about how PDF layers work.
The critique I'm making now falls into the broader "InfoWars is much more egregious in its infractions than the NYT category." But I do think it reveals the slippery line between knowing lies and what one might call "lies of egregious sloppiness." If some serious part of a person knows that they haven't proved what they're claiming but they (or their bosses) insist on claiming that you have proved it, isn't that a form of lying?
A lot of this boils down to good intent. I think the NYT is mostly claiming to have proved things when they believe they have and InfoWars isn't as worried about that kind of thing.
There's an argument that much of media is underlings doing the hard work of telling truths in the body of the piece so their bosses can say whatever they want in the headlines.
But the underlings are much more serious and honest at the NYT and the bosses at the NYT are less ridiculous in their headline assertions relative to what the body of the piece says.
Reading through this thread, I honestly think my main disagreement with you is that I don't think most InfoWars writers believe their own bullshit but I think the NYT writers mostly do.
That's fair. I'm very interested in the question of whether Infowars writers believe their own bullshit, not too certain either way, and will hopefully write a post soliciting thoughts on that in the future.
I agree that NYT is better than Infowars. As I said in the post:
"Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars, or anything like that. My goal is to make the very specific point that a wide variety of media sources, from NYT to Infowars, follow a similar pattern of very rarely lying explicitly or making things up, regardless of whether or not their articles are deceptive."
I think it is useful to distinguish between lies and egregious sloppiness, two very different categories that need different responses, and that calling the latter "lies of egregious sloppiness" just confuses the situation.
I also think there's a third category, something like "I know this broader point is true, the most important thing is to convince people that this broader point is true, so I don't need to worry too much about the veracity of the specific arguments I'm using", which is common both at the NYT and the Infowars grade, and which I sometimes catch myself doing too. Of course, people can use this excuse whether or not the thing they know to be true is actually true.
I think if you know that your specific argument is *wildly* insufficient to prove your headline and lead then that is a form of media deception. As I wrote, headlines and leads are what people consume and a lot of media exists to propagate them and the stories just justify them. So a disjunct between the headline and the body is fairly serious.
I guess we can quibble about whether it's worth contorting lying to cover that sin or not. Maybe we should just move away from the word lying altogether. All I care about showing is that InfoWars deceives people in unethical ways and the NYT, to the extent it deceives people, does so fairly innocently or from a place of non-malicious hubris.
But I think they are making things up. They are making explicit *false* claims about the *meaning* of artifacts in digital representations. So, in this case, I think you are also factually incorrect, and after it has been pointed out to you I would expect you to update your claim :-)
Considering the NYT decided that Sicknick was murdered even though the Capitol Police said the contrary, we most certainly can not agree that the NYT won't "draw such big conclusions from such thin findings."
Your definition of a lie here is far narrower than what most people take the word to mean, and I think so narrow as to be basically useless: a reporter would not only have to say something false, but also say that they know it's false - otherwise how can we possibly know that the reporter didn't believe it? If your claim is that the media doesn't do that, then I don't think anyone disagreed in the first place.
I don't think this confusion is just from people misreading you, either. In your original post, you seem mostly interested in distinguishing literally-false things from true-but-only-technically things, *not* false things that the reporter believed from false things that they didn't:
"But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context."
If this is the distinction you want to make, then "Obama birth certificate is a hoax" falls on the "false facts" side of the line. If your point is even broader - that we can't even evaluate the truth value of statements like this - then your conclusion surely must be that as long as someone could possibly believe something, it can't count as a lie, a definition you can't possibly expect people to have agreed with.
When Infowars declares that Obama's birth certificate is a hoax, they're lying by claiming to have definitive evidence of something that is false when they don't. The title of that article is pretty clearly a lie. I think you're right about most of the other cases, but this one is different.
If stating an incorrect conclusion that's arrived at by inference isn't lying, then surely that entails that lying is impossible, because all facts claims are based on an inference from evidence. (Unless you are making statements about your own qualia). I realise that may seem a pedantic distinction, but my point is that your distinction between a conclusion and a fact seems difficult to sustain systematically
You seem to say they actually decided to write that the birth certificate was fake *because* they inferred it from the artifacts. The alternative theory is that they wanted to lie that the birth certificate was fake, and they went out of their way to find some evidence, however flimsy, to justify it. And indeed, no matter what you want to lie, you can find some true facts you can claim you infer it from. It's quite plausible that this is what infowars often does, though it's always going to be a judgment call.
I suspect that they started out *believing* that the birth certificate was fake, and then they went out of their way to find confirmatory evidence, however flimsy.
Okay, so, suppose I get someone to utter the sentence "Scott Alexander is a terrorist." Then I can not lie by reporting that "Someone said that Scott Alexander is a terrorist." And by your lights, it's not even a lie if I then draw the conclusion in the post that Scott Alexander is a terrorist, because it's an incorrect inference, rather than just making things up? I've condensed this down to the smallest possible version where it isn't even credible that I am actually making the inference, but there is a version where my employer asks someone else to say the thing, then I write the article and now you, with your commitment to giving so much charity that you can't tell a rigged game when you see it, say "ah, this carnival operation isn't cheating me, the person who called me a terrorist in print isn't lying, just reasoning poorly. I will debate them about this in the marketplace of ideas!"? That's your pitch?
If they did in fact draw that inference, then you're right, but that's the part where you may be being too charitable. It is possible that the writer knew the birth certicate to be genuine, but wrote an article saying it was a hoax because that was the brief, and came up with some contrived rationale to justify that. If so, that would be a lie.
SurgeStick likely means an unsharpen mask. It’s a filter (in the sense of a convolutional kernel) that’s applied to images to increase local contrast. You can try it out yourself with a phone camera and it’s built in image processing suite, e.g. take a picture or text and drag the sharpen slider to the right.
Alternatively here’s a paper that explains the phenomenon and attempts to adress it — I’m on mobile atm so there may be more pertinent papers:
Simple image processing operation that increases the contrast on boundaries. Roughly, it involves sliding a (convolution) mask over the image and for every pixel saying "set this to a value that's *further away* from its surroundings." Doesn't affect the black writing, because it's already as black as it gets, but the green paper gets moved "away from black" - ie. towards white.
You *could* maybe get something similar from copy-and-paste, but only if you mess up the selection on the document you're copying from. Avoiding this is as easy as clicking "color to alpha" instead of just using the selection wand. And with naive editing like that, you'd expect a sharper division between the copypasted pixels and the green surroundings. The blurry white corona says "sharpen filter."
Great explanation. The damning part of it is that this phenomenon is probably known to pretty much anyone who’s ever done any image processing, so imho these “experts“ 100% of the time should have known how to interpret it.
Entirely unrelated, but the tendency of people to use “‚‚” as an opening quote irrationally enrages me. Now that I've mostly recovered from that rage, I'm wondering about its origin.
So sorry, I usually care a lot about typography and proper use of punctuation, too. (My personal pet peeve is “-“ vs “–“ vs “—“.)
What you’re seeing is the result of iOS’ autocorrect when typing on a German keyboard. I no longer switch keyboard languages every time because the keyboards have gotten good at accepting words from different languages than they’re set to. :/
This isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors?
At what point does the sharpen filter happen? Was it automatic in scanning the physical birth certificate into a digital file, or did someone do post-processing on it to make it look better?
It often happens multiple times in the image chain. The scanner almost certainly sharpened, and if the image was saved lossily, it was likely sharpened again. Possibly multiple times.
When "should" it happen? Once, just before the image is being displayed or printed, so you know how much sharpening you need/can get away with, but this ideal is rare.
An extra fun thing: other image processing (in this case, compression) done automatically by some photocopiers was bad enough to change the numbers in documents. As you might imagine, this could screw up any legal document involving numbers.
More generally, this kind of artifact is called ringing, and is one of the two main kinds of artifact you trade off against when processing any analog-ish signal. To oversimplify: go too sharp and you get frequency components that weren't in the original signal (ringing, aliasing); go too blunt and you lose frequency components that actually were in the original (blurring). The only way to completely avoid both requires you to know the highest frequency that's "really in" the data and sample at least twice that frequency. With extremely sharp boundaries, like those you find in printed documents, this requires an impractically high sample rate. Humans expect text documents to have clear boundaries between background and foreground, and blurry text is a pain to read, so the scanning software was probably tuned toward ringing by intentional design. And, as other commenters have said, if the background had been white (like in typical documents), a lot of the ringing would have been truncated out of the signal...
I used to work on scanner firmware, and our default was to run image segmentation, then apply a sharpening filter to text and a smoothing filter to halftone patterns. This was done by a CPU and ASIC in the scanner itself. Some of this could be turned off in advanced settings, but no scan is truly unprocessed. Raw/unprocessed scans look pretty terrible. But it can definitely produce artifacts, especially for text on an uneven background like the birth certificate.
It’s a way of making a (usually digital) image appear sharper. Extremely widely used in photography, to compensate for a lack of resolution or whatever. The user is often not aware of it unless they go looking. I would not be surprised if it also happens in scanners.
Why the white halo? Depends on the sharpening algorithm, but one of the oldest (and still good) is an ‘Unsharp mask’, where you copy the image, blur it a little, negate the brightness, then superimpose on the original. If you start off with a slightly blurred image of a black link on a grey background, then this will ‘cancel out’ some of the blurring. But if you get the intensity slightly too high, or the radius slightly too large, then you get this kind of white halo.
Not saying this is necessarily what happened here, but not implausible to me.
It most likely has something to do with the compression algorithm used by the Xerox brand scanning machines, here's German computer scientist David Kriesel talking about it
Exactly this, the birth certificate artifacts were due to a faulty character replacement algorithm (JBig2 compression) in Xerox Workstation Scanners, which was discovered by a german computer scientist in 2013.
His name is David Kriesel and here is his original blog post from 2013 on this Xerox Bug:
And eventually even popular US-Media reported it. He recounts that once he gave his cellphone number to one single US-Journalists (and asked for it not to be distributed), half a day later apparently everyone and their mother had it and he was flooded calls all day. And also all night, because what even are time zones.
Both of those things can be true. I think people often try to tell stories that are as close to the truth as possible in an attempt to convince themselves that they aren't really lying. People will also lie to themselves first in order to tell lies to others that they believe are true. People who lie in court usually try to convince themselves they are actually telling the truth. I call that "method lying".
But I'd say a high percentage of people also tell outright and bald-faced lies all the time. Sometimes people lie for very good reasons. Not everything is everyone's business. If someone asks an impudent question, they don't necessarily deserve an honest answer. I happily lie to people I don't wish to be honest with. Hope I'm not the only one...
I think it’s just a result of kids telling lies when they’re young and learning how easy it is to get called out on them and how mortifying it can feel to have them weigh on you.
Eventually you learn other approaches that are much less vulnerable and much less stressful and even normalise them to the extent you can deceive yourself with these approaches to deception.
> I was surprised to see that all their counterexamples seemed, to me, like the media signal-boosting true facts in a misleading way without making anything up at all. Clearly there’s some kind of disconnect here!
I think the disconnect is simple enough. It closely tracks the distinction between high and low decouplers. To wit, low decouplers reject the very distinction that Scott is making. To them, highly deceptive stories *just are* lying. They don't assign much weight to Scott's distinction between "making up facts" and presenting a badly deceptive narrative.
This could be because of cognitive-emotional deficits on the part of low decouplers. BUT it could also be because they are employing a mental model of the journalists producing the stories and the social institutions in which those journalists work, according to which Scott's distinction doesn't matter much.
FWIW: I strongly agree with Scott's ultimate point that there exists no clear and simple definition of "misinformation" and therefore no primitive action of "banning misinformation." I'm less supportive of the argument he uses to get there.
Yeah, "X is not the name for the kind of bad thing Y is" is very prone to scissoring high decouplers from high couplers, especially when presented a very highly-decoupled way.
When someone knows something to be true and seeks to hide it by emphasizing other things, I would consider that a lie. Sure, its a different kind of lie using avoidance to deceive, but still deceived. Its only a technicality the individual statements are true while the message is not.
"Among other common lies, we have the silent lie—the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all."
I'm not at all convinced that most of the people writing these articles believed they were false. Certainly there are many people who genuinely believe each of these conspiracy theories - why wouldn't conspiracy newspapers hire them as journalists and reporters?
I also think that I defined my terms very clearly at the beginning of this and the last post, and that it's important to be able to distinguish between things-that-are-explicitly-false and things-that-indirectly-deceive. It's hardly an objection to note that if you wanted to be vague and misleading, you could use the same term to describe both!
I haven't attempted a systematic analysis, but my impression is that over the last few years a lot of serious people, including many in the media, have started using the term "lie" to mean any falsehood or misleading statement they think is really bad, whether or not they know it was intended to mislead. Consequently we don't have a word that means what "lie" used to mean. Maybe we should start referring to intentional lies?
"Intentional lies" would still include "intentionally reporting true facts out of context" though, which is still much broader than Scott's narrow definition.
I think this runs into the same problem as a dishonest business wanting to hire dishonest employees: employees come as a whole package, and dishonest employees are as likely to screw you as your customers. So you have to hire honest employees and disguise the scam nature of your business from them.
If you're running a conspiracy newspaper, you would ideally like employees who believed the conspiracy, but for other reasons you have to have employees grounded in reality.
I think an unexplored media environment where this heuristic might also hold is in celebrity magazines. In the past I've parroted sentiments along the lines of "Celebrity magazines just make up shitty gossip" despite never actually reading them myself. In all likelihood celebrity magazine journalists probably play the deference game to unreliable sources that you sketched out; it seems pretty unlikely that their editors would be telling them "Yeah just make up as much drama as you can."
I didn't disagree with the original, per se. I just fundamentally don't think it's a useful exercise to draw a bright line between "lying" and "being flagrantly deceptive". I agree with the general point that disinformation is difficult or impossible to objectively define. But I don't think that, say, a news outlet repeating a flagrant lie told by an "expert source" uncritically is distinct from "lying" in any way that is important to me.
I gave a specific example of when it was important (people saying censorship is easy because we'll just censor outright lies and that will cure misinformation).
I guess maybe the disconnect here for me is that I rarely see things framed in those terms. The people I encounter who are in favor of censoring their opposition rarely make such distinctions. Maybe your online acquaintance circle is just higher quality than mine, I don't know.
The real place it becomes framed in those terms is the various efforts to advance Anti-disinformation as an act of legislation, where all these concepts have to be implemented in legal language.
See I really do disagree about this. I don't think a lot of journalist really are trying to reason. I am actually serious about this. I think for many of them getting across political points has become a more primary directive than reasoning out and conveying the truth.
See I think when you are recklessly disregarding or distorting the truth, that simply is a form of lying. Full stop.
If I am an arsonist murderer and firefighters run up to the building and ask me if there was anyone inside and I say "no", because I am stabbed all the people to death before the fire started, I did not "tell the truth".
I made a true statement, but in the broader context or our communication I lied.
Truth and falsity is a feature of individual statements, lying is about communication and context matters.
In the context of a news article stringing together 12 of 200 possible facts all from a source you know is questionable in order to deceive your audience is lying.
I don't like the word recklessly here because that's a way to accuse your opponent without substance. The whole pandemic discourse has been tragic with social networks banning opposing views with the pretext that they are endangering lives.
Trump said something about hydroxychloroquine and he was immediately accused of killing people. It's true, this medicine was not found to be effective but banning opposing views was not a solution. When people are failing in their interpretations, we just need to provide proper interpretations with detailed reasoning of every step and make effort to popularise these explanations instead of fighting so much with antivax and so on. It is much harder than simply banning people though. Only in cases of clear fraud they should be banned or when legally not allowed (like giving medical advice by non-professional).
In the case with hydroxychloroquine it turned out that the only case when a person died from overdosing it, was an intentional poisoning by a spouse and not self administered.
The case in point is the new scare about Chinese travellers bringing new covid variants to Europe and the US.
ECDC already announced that the measures to requiring negative covid test travellers from China are not rational (the new variants are already spread around and now we have immunity from vaccinations and previous infections) and should not be introduced. And yet, Italy, Spain, the UK and US have already implemented them.
When you try to argue about this, it gets counteracted that 1) China lies, 2) covid is not a joke – so many people have died and continue to die from covid. Are those people reckless with their claims? I wish I could shut them down with such accusations but 1) it is not going to work when they are majority, 2) they are just making a train wreck from data. That's all. Most likely no malice involved.
I think if the FBI reported no homicides investigated by Sandy Hook local police, because state police investigated it, and infowars characterized this as "FBI says no homicides in sandy hook", then that charactierization is false, a falsehood on infowars part. I could allow it wasn't an intentional lie at the time of reporting, but the minute someone tells them their error (surely someone told them?) and they do nothing to update the article, it's crossed the line into intentional dishonesty, i.e. lying.
To clarify "sandy hook police didn't investigate homicides" and "none occurred" aren't the same claim, and representing one as the other is a falsehood.
I think this is because you aren't a conspiracy theorist, and if the government tells you "actually, ignore this inconsistency in our narrative, we meant to say the narrative was consistent all along", you'll say "Oh, thanks for telling me, sorry for getting it wrong", whereas Alex Jones will say "Ha! I'm not dumb enough to fall for your coverup!"
I think this really does turn on whether the writer genuinely believes the Sandy Hook massacre to be fake. Let's suppose he believes there were no murders and that this is the reason the FBI statistics have a 0 in the murder column for Newtown.[1] In that world, the headline may be technically inaccurate (the FBI report refers to "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" rather than people killed, and refers to offences known to law enforcement only) but headlines often are technically inaccurate.
On the other hand, if the reporter knows that the Sandy Hook massacre did occur, then he must know that the data is an anomaly and, as you say, the FBI is not in any sense saying that no one was killed at Sandy Hook, so the headline is a lie.
We can't get away from the fact that whether a statement is a lie depends on the mental state of the person making the statement, so we can't just look at the statement in isolation to see whether it's a lie.
[1] Of course this would be a surprising lapse in an otherwise thorough conspiracy, and I doubt that Infowars in general treats FBI statistics as faultless, but this sort of thing is commonplace with conspiracy theorists.
Weekly World News - BAT BOY FOUND IN WEST VIRGINIA CAVE- Creature has huge eyes that can see in the ark and big ears the work like radar!
"Scientists claim to have found..."
"Dr. Ron Dillon says..."
"The scientist said..."
"Dillon refused to pinpoint the location of the cave..."
Dr. Ron Dillon, from what I can tell, has never existed, and the whole thing was made up by Weekly World News. However, if they had found an actual scientist named Dr. Ron Dillon to tell them all of this stuff and provide them with photos of questionable provenance depicting Bat Boy, they wouldn't actually be lying at all.
Fundamentally this article, like most articles these days, is written from the perspective of parroting a source's take. While some might consider this to be "spreading misinformation", that is not lying - The only actual fact the media is saying is true is that "somebody told us something". Whether you trust (or expect) the media to actually verify what its sources tell it is another story.
It's satire, as is most of the stuff that it completely made. Some attempts are better than others, both in terms of humor and social commentary, but none of this is meant to be taken seriously.
I actually subscribed to Weekly World News for a couple of years while in college. The articles were made-up, but not as satire; they were the 1980s equivalent of clickbait, for people who were loopy enough to believe them.
I subscribed in order to refine my bs-meter. I finally had to cancel my subscription for my own safety after I found myself wondering whether some of the articles were true.
I still think that people generally recognized that this is entertainment, not reliable reporting of facts. It's like watching pro wrestling. You can suspend your disbelief as you enjoy it, but people don't really think the piledrivers are real.
I remember being outraged as a little kid that the Weekly World News was allowed to print lies, but even by the time I was a teenager, I found it more amusing than anything else. (I still think "Midnight Star" is one of Weird Al's best.)
As my sister-in-law's grandmother would put it, "the story's for the tellin', not for the believin'."
This is all putting aside the issue of when the non-target audience doesn't get it, like the Chinese government reporting an article from The Onion as straight news.
There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore.
I have a high expectation for WaPo to not publish such an objectively incorrect sentence. In this particular case, I suspect incompetence, because I know how good the average scientist is at interpreting math, and I suspect even above-average journalists could make that mistake. But it should have been corrected within minutes of publication; *not correcting* the mistake suggests malice.
The heading and content of the graph itself is entirely accurate -- I gather the inaccurate wording pertains to a blurb from the home page that links through to the graph. I think that context makes it pretty clear that this is a mistake made by someone who writes blurbs to link to the actual pieces. Unless we want to argue that the blurb-writers are being instructed by people with editorial power to present false information about things that are quickly proven wrong once a reader clicks through.
I don't see how calling this a lie helps us for the purposes of this conversation?
Even if it's impossible to distinguish between "honest mistake" and lies, it doesn't prove the original point. Yes, it's hard to prove the media is lying. No, that doesn't mean they're not doing it all the time.
It's not the opponents who should prove you wrong - it's you doing the assertion and should prove the media's honesty. Benefit of doubt is not a proof of anything.
I know that in other cases, different parts of a Washington Post article are written by different people; I believe that usually, the headline isn't written by the author of the article. There could be a similar thing here, where perhaps the caption was written (or revised) by somebody other than the article's author. And it was an SEO optimization expert who didn't understand the specifics of these statistics.
But to circle around to your overriding point. Is it it misinformation? And is it clearly/cleanly definable as such? I think you're equivocating between lying and misinformation in making your overall point.
Is it this article? https://archive.ph/JXe3K My version says 'Price increases, though still elevated, are beginning to come down', so they may have changed it to make it technically accurate. I don't think it counts if you misinterpret a graph then change it to a more accurate interpretation a few hours later.
The caption is in the homepage blurb about the article, not in the article itself. It's still there as of now, although it was demoted down to half-width from full width.
Note that this is not annualized inflation in the sense of what the yearly inflation would be if it were always like it is in a given month. Rather, it shows the inflation up to a given month from a year prior. It's non-trivial (and in theory not even determined) from a chart like this whether prices are still increasing.
I think that he was in fact actually telling the truth. 9% and 7.1% are annualized rates and are usually the average over the last 12 months. To go from 9% to 7.1% in 1 month requires that the interest rate for that month be negative. If the months inflation had been zero than the rate could only fall to (11*0.09+0*0.09)/12=8.25%.
- Even if it had been over one month (say, 2021 Oct 1 to 2022 Oct 1 vs. 2021 Nov 1 vs 2022 Nov 1), your calculation would only work if there had been no inflation in the month from 2021 Oct 1 to 2021 Nov 1. Actually, inflation was already quite high in late 2021.
From a chart of year-to-year inflation like this, it's not possible to tell exactly how high inflation was in a given month.
It is simply and pointedly not a lie. I assume, based on this post being from December 29, that it was a reference to November CPI-U. That also lines up with the fact that November CPI-U's YoY inflation rate was 7.1%. The actual CPI-U in November was 297.711, as compared to 298.012 in October. So elevated prices did, in fact, come down vs. the prior month.
People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence.
Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test".
>where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence.
This one happens all the time. Also, there is a lot of reporting "speculations"/comments about say federal spending, that are both very easy to fact check and not true.
People are saying bad guy X had not done anything to address Y. Interested advocate Z says that "only $15 smackaroonis were spent on this since 2010, and none of them were authorized by X". Why does bad guy X hate people and do bad things?
When the reality is $120 smackaroonis were spent and $90 of them were authorized by bad guy and you can check confirm this with like 30 minutes of competent research if you know federal spending.
In your last link roundup you included one describing how the International Bullitin of Atomic Scientists published a hitpiece "which they knew to be false at the time of publication" (and also fabricated an interview with two scientists they said they spoke to)
Is that a rare example of a straight-up lie, or are you making the argument that the media AND ONLY THE MEDIA always lies by careful omission, and things that aren't the media like IBAS will still sometimes lie in the classic way if they think they can get away with it?
I actually originally had on that link "I guess this is a rare example of the media genuinely lying!" but took it out because it sounded too confrontational.
This is also useful context for why this might be an unusual situation - see https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty . I interpret that article as someone with an really strong axe to grind against EA pursuing the investigation, interpreting everything in the worst possible light, and getting so far ahead of themselves that the things they said were not true. I don't think they think of themselves as lying or making anything up, but I think it probably does qualify as such. I remain flabbergasted by BAS' decision to solicit an article from this person and to refuse to correct it besides a few measly editors' notes.
Even if your fine point about outright lies being rare is correct I am not sure that it justifies your views on censorship. The rise of the internet and forums such as this removed a large amount of material from the analysis that traditionally occurred prior to publication. So while infowars might not lie, its content is the source for many lies that are spread through unmoderated content. Having spent the pandemic swatting these lies on a site I had previously worked for I believe all forums should be moderated to remove direct lies. If the business cannot afford to do this that is their misfortune.
You are arguing for censorship. Censorship doesn't work. Your claim that Infowars is a 'source for many lies' could itself be deemed a lie, and removed by your proposed moderation system.
It sounds like someone who believed a story showing accurate video of that story, with the objection being they didn't show other parts of the video. This seems in keeping with all of the other examples I used here of people not deliberately lying, but selectively choosing which true facts to cite.
But Enderlin explicitly claimed that the boy had been killed by Israeli troops; that was the lie. The selective choice of material was to support the lie.
At the time, I thought your original post was so obvious, I didn’t bother to read it. Apparently, there is a large contingent of readers who think the media is really that unsophisticated and, from the looks of it, this is heavily biased towards people who just assume right-wing media is outright lying all the time. Hopefully some folks update, because it’s important to see the obfuscation and misdirection at the level it’s actually occurring.
Anyway, my $0.02 is that the only outright lies I’ve encountered in the past few years (ex. “Matt Taibbi is a right wing conspiracy theorist”) get quietly fixed in the amount of time it takes for me to write an angry post calling them liars. I’m not sure what damage that might cause, but it’s questionable if it’s something worth staging a crusade against. The best argument against that stuff is that the media source should indicate they made errors. While I’d love to see that, I doubt I ever will and merely update my personal priors against that agency, hence I read no newspapers nor watch any televised new, but then again I’ve been riding the “don’t trust mainstream media” train since 1996.
I stopped trusting mainstream media since the mid 00's. You got me beat by 10yr. How did you see it coming?
To my credit, I definitely started wondering where the fuck they were when a factual ball was dropped a few times before I gave up on them completely, so maybe you just gave up on them quicker?
I've actually wondered about this. I think the real reason I was able to jump ship on the MSM so early is due to a fantastic media literacy class I took in High School. We were reading Marshall McLuhan and analyzing camera shots and perspective, advertisements, subliminal marketing, etc. I LOVED that class. Since then I always ask, "what does the camera want me to see?" "What information is missing from this picture?" "Who wasn't interviewed?" etc.
Another piece to the puzzle is a gradual dawning that skepticism wasn't enough. I also had to doubt my assumptions and re-evaluate my priors. This started when I went to investigate military fatality numbers during the Iraq war and found that they were almost identical to the numbers during Clinton's term--a huge shock to me at the time. (i.e. the combat fatalities during the Iraq war didn't agglomerate to a meaningful statistic. Most Military deaths are from suicide and accidents) From there I just fell right down the heterodox rabbit hole into the Less Wrong/SSC vortex and overall it's helped me be even more keen on evaluating statistical inferences, false assumptions, and alternative explanations.
Scott's argument appears to be: so long as the media prints what someone tells them (presumably someone credible), then they cannot be doing anything wrong.
But that's not the role of media. The role of media is not to be the unquestioning sock puppets of experts, but to be critical and professional in their curation of what they disseminate.
This list is 25 different links from March 2022 to October 2022 - and there have been weekly or more frequently than weekly missile barrages in the several months since then.
I repeat the question: at what point does the mainstream media's unquestioning repetition of obviously wrong memes change from credible to credulous, or worse?
I didn't say they weren't doing anything wrong! I said so many times that I wasn't saying that!
My point is that - as you also say - media has to choose which experts to profile. If you're an insane conspiracy theorist, you will naturally choose to profile insane conspiracy theorist experts (who you think are right), and if you're an establishment stooge, you will naturally choose to profile establishment stooge experts (who you think are right), and if a censor chooses to ban one side rather than the other, they'll be banning them not for "lying" but for having the opinions they have and following the consequences of those opinions.
My original point is still not answered: the mainstream media, in theory at least, has the expertise and the responsibility to be professional/objective/critical/skeptical - not to mention the resources.
The crazy conspiracy theorist as well as the crazy conspiracy theory experts may not have the expertise, certainly don't have the professionalism and generally don't have the resources.
This is a fiduciary failure; not one writ into law but one certainly writ into the professionalism of the 4th estate.
The entire point of the examples of the numerous, repeated and over a long duration series of factually wrong media publications concerning "Russia running out of missiles" is: when exactly does the fiduciary responsibility/professionalism start to kick in?
Taibbi has been saying for some time that the MSM is no more credible than state media in the USSR during the Soviet era. Hard to dispute that given even just this one example.
Just going to say, "running out of missiles" only implies you're using more missiles than you're building. You could be running out of missiles for 100 years if you use one more than you make every year.
You could also say that the sources for these articles are propagandizing, and the journalists sock puppet saying what these sources are telling them are nothing more than stenographers.
Which would be more accurate: what you are saying or what I say above?
Mine is a fact, yours is a guess at intent. Mine is more accurate.
Like, what exactly are you claiming is "factually wrong" about the articles? Are you saying Russia is not running out, that it's replenishing as many missiles as it's spending? That seems completely unintuitive. Are you saying their predicted timeframes are incorrect? Only one of the articles made a prediction on timeframes, and it hasn't been long enough to sink or swim yet. Are you saying they're incentivized to lie? That's true but not definitive; Russia is just as incentivized to lie, and lo and behold we have conflicting information from the three countries.
What are your facts exactly? The fact that you cannot admit there is a clear and consistent pattern of publishing the same wrong headline for 10 months?
We are talking about literally 10 months of continuous mainstream media articles.
If it were a day, a week or even 3 months - that might be insufficient time to assess but we are talking about nearly a year. I can furthermore guarantee there will be further headlines along the exact same vein. So how long does this period of being wrong, finally constitutes a pattern of failure?
Re: Russia not running out of missiles: yes, it is clear they are not running out of missiles because the same mainstream media is reporting ever larger missile bombardments of Ukjraine. That is a fact or are you going to try and argue that as well?
Re: predicted timeframes - irrelevant. 10 months and counting, see above.
Re: incentivized to lie: I made zero pronouncements of incentive. I published (and others have as well) a clear, consistent and 10 month duration of the same, wrong meme per said media's own reporting of Russia missile barrages. If we want to talk about incentive, there can be lots including incompetence, unprofessionalism, being sock puppets of the powers that be, etc etc.
Lastly: Russia's incentive to lie: it is irrelevant here because they aren't making statements.
The ongoing well reported crashing of missiles into Ukraine is well reported.
Are you really trying to deny that these mainstream reports are not true?
"Russia running out of missiles" and "heaviest bombardment of Ukraine yet" headlines - from earlier this week - are directly incompatible.
There are no credible sources. The MSM doesn’t have the resources of the CIA and the picks are between ex-DOD/CIA talking heads who played party to the allowed two mainstream political narratives and any outlier in that pool is some weirdo with lots of baggage.
When Rumsfeld said it was just a few thousand dead-enders left, he probably believed it. Most of the guys in his chain believed it or didnt know. That one DIA embed in Erbil, sure he knew, but the only guy who might run into him and interview him would be a weirdo like Robert Fisk.
And moon isn’t being rationally contrarian, it has always been a reliable fellow traveler.
I remember not being convinced by last week's post. I think I am now.
There's this quote from Paul Halmos: "A good stock of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one". He was talking about math, but I'm starting to think it isn't at all domain specific. Scott gave me 8 (adversarially generated) examples, and now I see the pattern.
The lack of reading comprehension and misunderstanding in the replies to both of Scott's posts certainly demonstrates to me that the people here (a supposedly 'rational' environment) criticising Scott and the media have no better skills in this regard than the journalists they are so upset with, and so how they should expect better results from mere humans is beyond me.
1. Maybe most of the straight-up lies are done verbally/on video. E.g. Fox News hosts saying things offhand. (Then you might miss them because you don't watch videos/TV, which, fair enough, but most people do.)
2. People could claim that the cherrypicking/context-missing is *as bad* as straight-up lying, due to the "we subconsciously think something is true when we hear it" effect + most people not thinking critically *at all* about most of what they see.
It's not about it being as bad as actual lying or not. It's about whether the strategies that are effective at detecting outright lies will be effective against technically true misinfo.
I agree with your contention that the media -- even InfoWars -- tries desperately to be technically true and that any deception is almost always downstream of that.
For context, I have a much more positive view of the NYT than many people here. Still, I believe the NYT and InfoWars can both wield true facts to launder unstated but obviously implied conclusions.
Certainly there's still plenty of room to defend the NYT relative to InfoWars by debating the relative egregiousness of their behavior in embracing, interpreting, and spinning those true facts.
BUT I actually think you're ignoring a pretty important component of lying.
If I convey a bunch of true facts to you, knowing that you take them as a broader claim but I don't take even the slightest effort to clarify the scope of my assertion, then I would consider what I'm doing lying. And especially in the relationship between news author and reader, it is misleading to the point of lying if the author is holds back counterarguments/contrary facts that the author themselves find persuasive.
The reality is that InfoWars often publishes stories that its own authors believe are false. That is a form of lying. They are leading horses to water over and over again when they know the water isn't actually there. Meanwhile, I do think the NYT is very much sincere in believing the thrust of most of its articles. The NYT is leading itself to water as well. So it is not generally lying, or at least it is not telling readers lies that it doesn't believe.
InfoWars is lying when it leads readers to conclusions that it does not believe.
Why do you think Infowars' authors believe its stories are false? Certainly there are many people who believe Infowars-style conspiracy theories. Why wouldn't Infowars hire those people? Why wouldn't they be the kind of people who found something like Infowars?
Alex Jones has since admitted that Sandy Hook was real. There was testimony in the trial that he knew the conspiracy was a good revenue driver. He lied regularly during the trial (about his texts etc) so there's plenty of evidence that Jones is willing and able to lie.
As an aside, I have personally worked at the NYT newsroom (reporting fellow) and at conservative outlet Washington Examiner. And I found the latter to be much sloppier and less worried about thinking through the impression it gave from facts. The Examiner would headline any big budget deficit number etc on my beat whereas the NYT had very detailed copy editors who would spot factual assertions in my copy that I didn't even consider I was making and push back on them.
On InfoWars, it seems naive to presume that the outlet pushing the most misleading stories (InfoWars) is acting in good faith rather than just supplying readers with what they want. I get the point (one that Noam Chomsky has made) that outlets can just hire the bias that they want. But I actually think it's fairly hard to staff up true believers who can write and report credibly for conspiracy and super rightwing type stuff -- hence why a bunch of liberals like myself found themselves out of college writing for the local section of the Washington Examiner before it was killed.
Conspiracy theorists and right wing outlets are much much sloppier with their false impressions and are often so lazy that they're willing falsely lead readers to conclusions that they know to be false but serve their ideological or financial ends. The NYT is full of true believers. Maybe that just makes them more sophisticated at misleading people but I do think it precludes them from being liars.
What do you think of the claim that Alex Jones admitted he was lying about Sandy Hook because he was under lots of financial and legal pressure to do so?
Also, can you explain more about why the Examiner had to hire liberals, when there are so many conservatives?
It's possible. We're getting into very convoluted psychological storytelling here. I think he could very well be someone who doesn't care about the truth very much. Maybe he "believes" whatever is convenient to him. If he's so cavalier with the truth that it bends to what serves him then I think when he says false things, he deserves the morally laden "liar." Whereas from my experience, I do think the NYT is extremely sincere in trying to tell the truth as they come to it and that motivates most of their staff beyond ideology.
To be clear the Examiner story is somewhat tangential and just fun personal experience from almost a decade ago now. To the extent journalism is a white collar profession of college graduates in the US these days, I think the supply of potential reporters is pretty liberal. And I would say that believing in wild, Sandy Hook-style conspiracy theories is pretty antithetical to the type of person who wants to do really fact-based reporting. Reality has a liberal bent and reporters are in the business of engaging with reality.
This seems like moving the goalposts on lying to me. (Alex Jones tried to use psychosis as a defense in the defamation case btw). If a “media site” is run by mentally unstable people that confabulate information that they themselves believe, from the perspective of the consumer that’s a site that lies.
Those are just the personal experiences I have to draw from. But what is the best conservative news outlet in your opinion? I can assure you that the WSJ reporters are mostly liberals.
Can you clarify whether your claim is that right-wing outlets, right-wing reporters or right-wing outlets not staffed by liberal reporters are sloppy and lazy?
For ease of discussion purposes, I'm essentially boiling publications down to management and to the reporters.
I think every major news outlet that conducts novel reporting is staffed by liberal reporters (and certainly reporters that voted against Donald Trump). Now I think there are outlets like FoxNews.com and Breitbart etc that are actually staffed by conservative "reporters" and I believe that their quality is poor. They don't publish much novel reporting and they are pretty lazy in their willingness to mislead. So I'm saying that I can't think of any outlets with conservative reporters that are serious (this is totally excluding opinion writing to be clear). I'm open to hearing counter examples. I just don't think conservatives do much reporting -- we can argue about the reasons.
Most media outlets have more conservative management than their reporters. But even at the WSJ my sense is that the editor rungs are pretty normie centrist types and certainly not modern day republican party populists. Sometimes the editors-in-chief have been very murdoch aligned.
In terms of my Examiner experience, there was clearly a very strong conservative mandate from the top. The headlines and story angles were the most biased. Reporters were pretty factual. The bias would be stuff like hating bikes and hating government spending. No one was particularly motivated. And most of the fact-checking hung on the reporters. I don't remember us having much of a corrections policy. So the laziness kind of permeated. I'm mostly talking about intellectual rigor but I do think there was a good deal of actual laziness too.
There is at least one former infowars employee who alleges that their stories are (at least often) known to be false. The most clear-cut example I can quickly find is here:
"Shortly after Jones began selling the supplements, someone posted a video on YouTube holding a Geiger counter displaying high radiation readings on a beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The video went viral, stoking fears that radiation from Fukushima was drifting across the Pacific Ocean. Jones saw an opportunity and sent me, along with a reporter, a writer and another cameraman, to California. We had multiple Geiger counters shipped overnight, unaware of how to read or work them, and drove up the West Coast, frequently stopping to check radiation levels. Other than a small spike in Half Moon Bay — which the California Department of Public Health said was from naturally occurring radioactive materials, not Fukushima — we found nothing.
"Jones was furious. We started getting calls from the radio-show producers in the office, warning us to stop posting videos to YouTube stating we weren’t finding elevated levels of radiation. We couldn’t just stop, though; Jones demanded constant real-time content. On some of these calls, I could hear Jones screaming in the background."
Okay, I think I've got it. It's not especially clear whether you think:
A) "In (example) we see (media) being irrational but not lying; they have a biased belief in X"
or
B) "In (example) we see (media) can plausibly act like they are irrational non-liars with a biased belief in X, at least if we only consider (example) in isolation; it does not particularly matter if they actually believe X"
A) asserts their internal mental state, and B) does not.
I think in the case of Jones, A) is false- there is sufficient evidence that he acts with intent to deceive. But he is very good at fulfilling B)- a casual observer cannot distinguish him from an honest lunatic.
I don't think most people are using "lying" to mean "make factual errors".
Because there's no doubt that the NYT regularly makes factual errors. They have a "Corrections" page (1) to show all the self-confessed factual errors they make every day. From a cursory glance these are both uncontroversial, ie the NYT themselves admit factual error, and occasionally important, ie the NYT exaggerating the number of children hospitalized by Covid by a factor of ~12x. (2)
And yet this doesn't, necessarily feel like lying. Good faith error happen all the time and there's an approved process for correcting them, which is publicly acknowledge your mistake and issue a correction. This happens all the time and, presuming the process is followed, usually without ill feelings. And, fair cop, props to the NYT for having this page. But there must be thousands of factual errors on the page over a year and yet I don't "think" anyone feels lied to about that. Maybe in edge cases, where incorrect information was left uncorrected for a year or more for partisan purposes, people feel lied to, but for 90%+ of the corrections on the NYT corrections page, those don't feel like "lies" and if anything they give the NYT more credibility, not less.
Simply put, I don't understand the difference between "lies" and "errors" in your framework. Because people get mad about "lies", at least in my experience they're pretty forgiving about "errors".
And, to lay my cards on the table and avoid the "view from nowhere" issue, I don't get the whole concept of this series. Are you proposing that there are good censors working for admirable purposes? That Infowars and the NYT don't know exactly what they're doing? Who exactly are these reasonable censors you think are making a good faith error? What evidence is there that "misinformation" is anything more than a fig leaf for ideological censorship?
I think Scott is building a case for an expansive, `classical liberal' defense of free speech, and these articles are pre-emptive rebuttal of the `but censoring misinformation is easy and necessary and doesn't count as curtailing free speech' line of attack.
Yeah, and that debate feels very...2014. Maybe the stuff I read is too online but this feels like a debate that's passed. I dunno, it's certainly ambitious.
If we want to remain a society that values free speech then this battle needs to be fought. And will probably have to be refought every generation forevermore...
Agreed. And not just in the general case, there are specific near-term decisions that will be made in terms of corporate policy at social media companies and national legislation across the globe. The current dynamic is by no means settled (until the next generation thinks their challenges are unique) and is under active debate
Sure, the wokies control the discourse and say that everybody who wields the free speech argument against them is nazi-adjacent. However, both their wider agenda and this insinuation in particular are pretty unpopular, and it's not clear how exactly are they going to get from here to actual totalitarian dictatorship, without a civil war at least.
That depends on how bad the technological stagnation is going to get. You can't indoctrinate away all the evidence that exposes the underlying absurdity of their assumptions quickly enough absent a totalitarian dictatorship, and if stagnation is unavoidable, then humanity is doomed anyway, and all that's left is picking some variety of poison.
PS, on reflection, I think it's worth clarifying that debate can be very frustrating if you don't use terms in the common way. I think Scott thinks he clearly defined "lying" and that's just not how most people using "lying" and it more closely matches to "error". So it's not that the arguments are incorrect but that they don't really...meet each other. Like ships passing in the night. You can very clearly specify that when you say "pink" you're referring to the color purple but when you point out the "pink" dress, people get confused.
I'm just amazed by the number of commenters who say "most people" don't use the word in the way Scott does, without giving any evidence that the full statement is more correctly "most people I know" or "most people with whom I identify" -- since of course I doubt anyone here has the slightest clue what "most people in the United States" or "most people alive in 2022" mean by the word. Is this by their definition a form of lying?
He hasn’t stated that there are censors making good faith errors. I read him as saying the opposite, that there is no “easy button” that will allow someone to mechanistically separate truth from lies without applying human judgement into the mix.
The difference between a lie and an error is that an error is an unintentional falsity while a lie is a manipulative falsity. The article is stating that what people are calling lies don't actually include a falsity, so we don't even get to the intent portion. (I'd probably say 'deceit' covers manipulation with or without falsity. People claim folks are lying when they're instead deceiving.)
Yeah, but this is what threw me and I attempted to address, albeit apparently poorly. The article goes really hard on the factual analysis aspect when that isn't really what grabs people, it's the intent. Like with the Iraq War analysis, this feels like the distinction between "lie" and "bullshit" (1). Which is, like, yes, useful, but If someone said they were lied to and you corrected them and said they weren't lied to, instead they were bullshitted...I'm not sure you're communicating effectively with that person.
Or, to rephrase, I've already linked to an unambiguous list of factual errors committed by the NYT and there's no shortage of people who assume ill will from the NYT by default. It wasn't even hard to find an example of an unambiguous factual error on a CW topic with clear partisan bias.
But that's not what motivated people and that's not why this article came about. Scott wrote an article and got a bunch of interesting comments where there was clearly some kind of miscommunication, "Some commenters weren’t on board with this thesis, and proposed many counterexamples - articles where they thought the media really was just making things up. I was surprised to see that all their counterexamples seemed, to me, like the media signal-boosting true facts in a misleading way without making anything up at all. Clearly there’s some kind of disconnect here!"
And I'm trying to grapple with Scott's argument because, based on very minute differences, it's either egregiously wrong or trivially correct. There's some definition of "lied" where we weren't lied into the Iraq war because, while everyone involved strongly suspected the evidence they presented secondhand was false, they intentionally did not verify these things enough to show they were false. But at the bottom line, using whatever word you want, a lot of people were lead into a horrific war on faulty premises and that's bad.
And this sliver of a technical point is supposed to lead to...?? Who's going to be convinced by this technical nitpicky point?
And maybe this will actually be constructive, but I went back and reread the original and Scott very clearly lays out that this is a nitpicky point and then he'll explain why it's important, so I go down to the fourth section and read through his explanation of why this is important and there's references to a lazy censorship argument and...there's no links. Alright, not true, there's one link to an old SSC post, but there's an assertion there's a broad group of people with censorship power that Scott will be making this argument to and yet no links to this specific argument being argument being made by anyone, much less anyone with censorship power.
And, again trying to be constructive, I would really appreciate some link to these people, to, for lack of a better term, mistake-theory censors. Because I can believe that they exist, even if I've never seen them, but I have no way to model them or understand them and no frame of reference. I definitely believe in conflict-theory censors and there's plenty of evidence for them but who are these people banning accounts who are genuinely, sincerely confused on factual distinctions?
Sorry for the ramble, increased typing speed has lead to more communication, not better communication.
I think you're stretching a bit on some of these. The general point you made was fine, but you don't have to claim it applies to every single conspiracy theorist for it to be a valid perspective.
For example, on 5, the title of the article is "NEW OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE IS A FORGERY". This statement is false, and intended to deceive; it's a lie. I believe Alex Jones knew it was false too.
The thing that makes this headline a lie even under your definition is that it makes a statement with certainty, where the evidence is tenuous and doesn't justify that certainty. If the headline was "WEIRD VISUAL ARTIFACTS IN OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE: IS THIS A FORGERY?" then it would not be an outright lie, but that's not what they wrote.
I get that you are making a nuanced point about the low-level factual claims in the articles themselves. But I think the hyperbolic headlines are a big part of the problem here; the headline itself is making a claim of certainty about the interpretation of the facts in the article which is false, i.e. not supported by the evidence. (Consider how many people just read the headline of an article in their Facebook feed, or skim the lede.)
I can see a possible maximally nitpicky reading here of your original claim "Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false" because you think Alex Jones really believes the headline summary is true, in the same the sense that a person having a schizophrenic break can literally believe they are talking to God over 5G, and they are not lying when they make that statement because they believe it is true. However, I don't think that applies here; Alex Jones ('s lawyers) explicitly claimed he was lying about Sandy Hook in his court case; his defense was "Infowars Alex Jones is just a character, this stuff is made up, I wasn't really claiming this stuff is true, and no reasonable person would interpret this as a factual claim". This could just be a thing defense lawyers say, but I think it's likely he's knowingly lying in a bunch of these headlines, because it's profitable for him to print this stuff.
I think you'd have supported your argument better if you conceded the point where it's clearly (IMO) wrong, as a way of making it clear you're not claiming "the media NEVER lies", instead of your actual (and I believe useful) point "directionally, the media outright-lies way less than most people think". Your point is not weakened one bit by admitting that Alex Jones does indeed knowingly lie.
When I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that.
If later it turned out it *was* a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been *lying* when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning).
Jones states his own facts and the conclusion he infers from them. If his conclusion is wrong, the correct term for this wrongness is "failed inference", not "lying".
Looks like at least some of it was 100% unequivocal lying, e.g. when he falsely claimed to have two university degrees. (There's more that probably falls into that category, this is just the clearest example with no wriggle room in what he said and no uncertainty about the facts.)
I agree with you that it's possible that Jones really does believe his schtick, and he's making a mistake, and I agree he's not lying in that possible world -- and likewise we wouldn't be lying if he turned out to be right and we were wrong; just mistaken.
But my point was that it's also a reasonable reading of the situation that he's knowingly lying, at very least knowingly overstating the certainty of the headlines, if not actually at the object level of the claims themselves. We can parse out "lying" vs. "exaggerating with misleading intent" but that doesn't seem to be your point here, you're claiming these claims are good faith failed inferences.
I don't claim this bad-faith interpretation is certain; it's possible he is really getting high on his own supply and believes his conspiracy stuff to the bone. My point is I think it's quite reasonable to give at least 50/50 odds that he's knowingly making bad-faith manipulations. And I personally think the bad-faith interpretation is more likely than the good-faith interpretation after the Sandy Hook trial. I personally think you should weight this possible world more heavily (or at least acknowledge its existence, and make your case for why it's not likely).
Perhaps another lens for this, is that you seem to be ascribing purely Simulacrum Level 1 behavior to these actors (good-faith attempts to model the world and make true statements about the world), whereas I'm making a claim that at least for Jones, I think it's more likely he's consciously operating at Simulacrum Level 3 (making knowingly-false statements about the world in order to honestly build a political coalition), or perhaps even Level 4 (making Level 3 statements without any underlying allegience to a political coalition, just for personal power/gain).
I agree with this. It seems like this terrain gets sorted out through libel suits. And maybe that's a better arena than via broader public policy.
Scott's using this material to talk about the problems with hypothetical censorship of things we might call misinformation (and cannot prove are lies). I hear him saying, it's potentially as problematic to contemplate censoring Infowars' misinformation as it is the NYT's misinformation. He's arguing there is no safe place from which to make censorship arguments relative to the misinformation tactics that media broadly engages in.
As an aside, I'd find it helpful/interesting if he engaged with how other countries that we more or less consider to be democracies with more or less independent media address these issues differently because I think it may cast new light on his core arguments (not sure though).
I agree this thread puts forth some good points on the difficulties of censorship, and I agree directionally with Scott’s main point. (I just disagree that to be consistent you have to ride that horse all the way to defending Alex Jones as a good-faith world modeler.) I think it’s consistent to believe that Jones should not be censored, even though (if?) he’s a liar who knowingly peddles bullshit because it lets him sell more survival kits for bunkers.
One interesting point about libel though - as Musk found out as he speedran the evolution of content policies at Twitter, even speech that is not illegal can be so objectionable that even free-speech maximalists don’t want to associate with you on their platform. (In case that is oblique, I’m referring to Musk (rightly IMO) kicking Ye off Twitter, even though he didn’t say anything illegal when he posted swastikas. Though I’m not sure “due process” was followed.) So that is probably a weaker backstop than is optimal.
On how different countries handle this - I think most countries are much less committed to erring on the side of free speech, I don’t know of anywhere in the EU that has a strong constitutional protection like the US does. Most are more inclined to recognize an obligation not to cause harm alongside a right to free expression, and most are willing to include fairly broad things like “incitement to Naziism/anti-semitism” in the category of “harmful”. Personally I think they go a bit overboard in the other direction, there’s a quite substantial philosophical difference in this regard. For example banning Mein Kampf in Germany until recently, though I can understand the sentiment. I too would be interested in deeper analysis here.
1. Did you investigate lying by omission? That is when they don't report something a reasonable person might think is obviously newsworthy.
Lying by commission is one thing and maybe (just maybe) that is rare.
2. There was a Princeton PhD on whether the "mainstream" media is partisan, many years ago. This is a different question but perhaps it is related to yours. The way they investigated is by counting how often a media outlet mentions the name of the political party when someone in that party has been caught doing something bad. ("Republican senator Gidd caught lying about credential" versus "Senator Gidd caught lying about credential").
3. Btw, regarding perceptions on whether media lies - many ppl believe their side alone is the victim (regardless of which side that is). I found this very interesting. And told myself maybe that is how I should figure out what side I see as mine!
So there's this psychology test where you give people a list of words like "ice", "cold", "snowman", "santa", "reindeers", etc. And then you ask them whether certain words appeared on the list. Did the word "santa" appear on the list? Yes. Did the word "apple" appear on the list? No. Did the word "winter" appear on the list?
If you ask a word that's semantically related to the words on the list, like "winter", people are more likely to incorrectly think that word appear on the list than semantically unrelated words like "apple".
I suspect this sort of phenomenon is happening with the comments Scott received. The commenters read a bunch of articles that all gesture towards a particular conspiracy theory, for example the idea that the democrats conspired to commit fraud so that they'd win the election. If you ask them whether any of the articles in that list contain a semantically related piece of content (e.g. in the list of articles you've read, is there an article that says "we've found direct proof that the democrats committed fraud to win the election"?), the commenters are more likely to incorrectly state "yes, in fact, the list does contain such an article!" than if you were to ask about a semantically unrelated piece of content (in the list of articles you've read, is there an article that says "rainbows consist of just various shades of the color green"?).
This effect is probably magnified by the fact that most people don't actually read the articles. They'll just read the headline. And furthermore they probably didn't read that headline isolated from any context. More likely, they encountered that headline in the context of "look at this brazenly lying article!"
I don't entirely trust google (or other search engines) not to insert their own biases. Certainly they routinely fail to show me relevant articles that exist, but the obvious explanation is that they are giving me the lowest common denominator answer - whatever a semi-literate unilingual American would care about.
I also absolutely fail to trust newspapers to preserve the original version of their articles online, rather than revising them; I see this all the time, as new information is revealed. Sometimes the interesting (to me) material disappears in this process; sometimes OTOH the article replaces stock photos with pictures of the actual event reported. (i.e. accuracy and detail may go up or down.)
Your methods would not detect systematic biases against retaining and/or reporting the least honest articles, if any exist. I have no reason to believe that they do exist, but a better research method would collect articles as they are published, and run one's own indexing system over the resulting collection.
The kernel of the "problem" is what do we mean by "the media" and what do we mean by "lying".
Alex Jones lost the defamation claims. "Defamation" has a particular legal meaning which one might equate with "lying" depending on what the definition of "lying" is.
Calling Jones part of "the media", to me, is like TV/entertainment wrestling a sport.
I'd suggest Umberto Eco's essay "the force of falsity" which can be found in his collection called "Serendipities", could be useful backdrop for discussing the relationship between "the media" and "mendacity".
PS are grocery store tabloids part of "the media" and does that change how Scott thinks about his assertion?
Default judgements are not handed out at random. They are applied when a party appears to be going to great lengths to prevent a fair trial and does not respond to lesser sanctions. The behavior is interpreted by the courts to be strong evidence of liability.
In Jones' case, I suspect he preferred the default- it allows him to claim unfair treatment for his unskeptical followers.
ETA: I'm talking about mid-pretrial defaults here. A later reply correctly points out that the more common no-show defaults are not very epistemically meaningful.
It is my understanding that a default judgement does in fact conclude this. See for example the Heslin v. Jones default order: "...this Court finds that Defendants' egregious discovery abuse justifies a presumption that its defenses lack merit."
Meh. I am a litigating lawyer. My first jury trial over 30 years ago was a defamation claim.
There maybe be some state law nuances between a "default judgment" and "judgment on the merits" and between a "default judgment" which is reduced to a "final judgement" and a default judgment which is not yet a final judgment, the latter may be vacated.
But I'd think that a default judgement which has become a final judgment does in fact presumptively evidence that the defendant has committed the tort alleged by the plaintiff and has no meritorious defenses. In this case, Jones never moved to vacate the default judgment so far as I know.
So it is entirely appropriate and non-controversial to say that Jones has been found culpable of committing defamation.
IF smilerz has a legal degree and is a member of the bar, I'd like to hear your thoughts. (Among 2 attorneys there are usually 3 opinions.) But if you aren't an attorney ...
I don't think Scott's argument regarding the complications of censoring "misinformation" rise or fall on whether we include InfoWars or grocery store celebrity/alien mags in "media."
Also, whether we accept his definition of "lies" or not, I think his argument still stands that the things we point at when we say the news media is guilty of misinformation are not going to be easily controlled through any kind of objective rule-making.
In the US, the media (aka the press identified in the 1st amendment) has slightly different calculus of culpability regarding defamation than an ordinary person who has putatively made defamatory statements.
It well may be the case that misinformation may not be easily controlled through any kind of objective rule-making, but that conclusion does not rest upon Scott's argument concerning the evaulation of the alleged mendacity of the media.
>You will always need to make judgment calls about which sources’ true facts are important vs. irrelevant, which sources’ studies are valid versus flawed, and which sources’ points that you don’t have good responses to are too annoying or conspiratorial to take seriously anyway.
That last category is doing __a lot__ of heavy lifting, both here and in the original Lies, Damned Lies, And The Media Which Does Not Make Them. I think there's some real inferential difference between "strictly technically did not claim an untrue thing" (which you've admirably demonstrated to my satisfaction and mirth, truth sure is stranger than fiction often) and "disregard the conclusion anyway, because Obvious Sanity Check". Remember when you wrote Heuristics That Almost Always Work? All of these have been *very popular* conspiracy theories/false conclusions endorsed by [vocal thousands...silent millions]. The fact that a good chunk of otherwise-mostly-sane-people can fall into these same gears-level malfunctions again and again...does not inspire much confidence in my own Sanity Check Rock! I'm reminded of the studies showing that education and intelligence seem to correlate *positively* with propensity-to-believe-conspiracies-or-other-false-beliefs. You do gesture at this a bit with the reference to old Motivated Reasoning post, but I think it really underlies a lot more than merits a mere throwaway. Combine that with a slippery top-level word like "lie" meaning different things to different people, and...well, of course confusion will abound.
(Which relatedly makes it interesting that none of the examples here are left-coded conspiracies/false beliefs. Selection bias?)
Finally, will echo that the #2 defense is really weak. My Sanity Check Rock says that "misheard a poll question in ways significantly outside close-phenome range" is itself pretty dubious. You've amended it to include a more-plausible defense, which I appreciate, but that really ought to have been the more intuitive solution first. We already know that the "with covid/by covid" distinction is challenging for many to parse; applying this in the opposite direction to vaccine adverse events seems eminently reasonable. (And this probably explains a lot of Long Covid stuff too.) I.e. it's a baserate error...bad things ever happen, sometimes they coincidentally occur near the event of a vaccination, and this is a totally true non-lying pattern in the data. It's the extrapolating from there that tends to get people in epistemic trouble.
Addendum to finally: less combative title would earn you some Charity Points. The actual body of the post is significantly less hostile, and you do the typical thing at the end of trying to make an olive-branchy conclusion of Everyone Is Right After All, Just In Unexpected Ways. One thing the news really does do is pair misleading clickbaity headlines with articles that sometimes literally say the exact opposite. I think this particular fallability is definitely easier for you to excise than, say, the NYT.
Is there a point at which chains of deliberate misrepresentation become indistinguishable from outright fabrication? Like say there's a shady pollster that uses poor methods to obtain data and throws out results that don't fit their desired narrative. Then there's a shady conspiracy rag that cherry picks from these polls to establish the most extreme/clickbaity version of that narrative, trying it all together with lots of logical fallacies. Then some talking head reads that rag and decides to summarize it in an unscrupulous and reductionist manner on their news program. At the end of that chain you have a claim that is completely divorced from reality. Does it effectively matter that the lie has a paper trail? It's almost like a game of telephone where everyone deliberately shifts synonyms in and out until the result shares literally nothing in common with the original phrase.
The point regarding how we combat it. If the talking head just makes it up out of whole cloth, then we have one set of remedies. But if they they are just careful to reference articles and conduct interviews with crazies, then they are probably protected from certain classes of regulation. You would either need to impose more absolute liability (which has repercussions for legitimate news) or maybe bring back the both-sides style fairness doctrine. Or adopt some other measure, but the specifics of the standards/laws/rules are probably different
Without a doubt, the MSM does often propagate blatant falsehoods on the subject of intelligence research and the behavioral sciences. For example, the media will often characterize factual info on IQ as "pseudoscience" or as "debunked" when in fact the data is commonly accepted knowledge among experts. Not sure how much of this misinformation is due to ignorant blank slatism or deliberate mendacity though.
Presumably just about anything from The Onion or The Babylon Bee would also technically count - but those sites are not even pretending to be `real' news. Ditto the Borowitz report, although the NewYorker does claim to be real news. How do you disambiguate `lies trying to pass off as the truth' from `self-confessed-lies for humor/effect?' I have no idea what Real Raw News is but judging from the article title I would assume this is in the same vein as The Onion.
I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc.
One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things.
Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved.
I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?
Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up?
There only "conspiracy theories" once you stop believing in them (or never have). Until then, they're "obvious" things that "everybody" knows to be true (so going through the evidence and arguments personally, and carefully, is just a big waste of time).
I don't think that's right -- the conspiracy theorists that I've encountered often seem keenly aware that the 'masses' don't (yet) agree with them. "Wake up; you've been lied to" and all that sort of thing.
Point taken. Conspiracy theory is a loaded term. However, the "conspiracy" captures an important common element - that people with power both know and are deliberately obscuring the truth. Now, are people with power deliberately obscuring the truth? I'd say generally not. There are inconvenient facts they are choosing to ignore, or at least remain ignorant of when they shouldn't be. But that doesn't really differentiate them from everyday people. We all do that. That issue is also that people with power have singular and non-contradictory motives which allows them to coordinate on complex obscuring far better than the average person. I think this type of thing does happen tacitly. But the prior about whether overt attempts to pull it off work is the difference between one way of thinking (normies call it conspiring theory) and another (conspiracy theorists call them sheeple).
Maybe the technical point about lying is correct but it fails to address the broader problem of misinformation. This has been critical in the context if the pandemic. Proving that the toxic misinformation was not actual lying will not lower the deaths it was reposible for or protect us from the same or worse in rhe future. Censorship may be bad but unfortunately at times it is the least worst option......and really do you think the merchants of misinformation are actually worth defending on the basis of the technical definition of lying?
I think if you want to fight something it is useful to know what you are fighting against. People constantly propose plans to fight misinformation which would work if the misinformation was direct lying, but fail if the misinformation was signal-boosting facts out of context.
So what's your proposal to fight misinformation in all its varied forms? At some point any attempt at a black and white analysis will fail so there will always be a reliance on human judgement and that will always be flawed. The perfect is the enemy.of the good.
"Prediction markets can fight misinformation. But relatively few people care enough about accuracy to be interested in them."
A Great Courses course on Economics introduced me to the concept of "rational ignorance." The idea is that on many topics it is rational (in the economics sense) to be ignorant because the cost of not being ignorant is too high.
My model of the world is that VERY FEW people actually care about being correct. People do care about agreeing with their friends and peer and tribe. For these folks, it make very little sense to actually form an independent opinion -- best case is they wind up where they were going to go anyway and worst case is they discover that they shouldn't agree with people with whom they want to agree.
Stack this on top of the effort required to actually dig through data, understand the definitions in play, run statistical analysis, take into account p-hacking ... even for the folks who DO care there are just too many topics to investigate.
Yep, this is a great point. I'd also add that people honestly underestimate the degree to which they are ignorant, both because admitting this is low-status and because they rarely face the opportunity to be decisively proven wrong.
> So what's your proposal to fight misinformation in all its varied forms?
This question confuses me. We have a way, and have for centuries. It's called liberalism. Are you somehow unaware of it? You allow all information, all claims, and let the marketplace of ideas, liberal science, fight it out. Eventually, the truth will become clear to most people.
Liberalism is an approach one can take, but I don't know if I would call it a "proposal to fight misinformation in all its varied forms". One wouldn't call drug legalization a "proposal to fight drug abuse" either, even if one believed it was a better policy.
It is absolutely that. Liberalism doesn’t simply mean “let everybody say what they want.” It does mean that, of course, but there’s more to it. It means, “Let everybody have it out, and let the best ideas win.” This is what is supposed to happen in science, and it’s what liberalism advocates for society. It says that people, in general, can be trusted to know good ideas from bad ones, given enough time. And you know what? That has worked out pretty well! Look at civil rights, gay marriage, marijuana legalization. The better arguments for these superior positions gradually won out.
And if the public *can’t* be trusted to know what’s best—what does it mean to have a democratic society then? If elites get to dictate to the masses what they are allowed to see, hear, think, and believe, who is actually in charge?
There is no guarantee that the best ideas will win out. Archaeologists converged on "pots not peoples" after WW2, rejecting the earlier belief in volkwanderung... but genetics shows those post-WW2 archaeologists were completely wrong. Medicine was mostly harmful up until the 20th century but people treated it seriously anyway throughout history without the correct idea of rejecting it winning out.
You have given a list of things that are currently popular and weren't in the past, and because they are popular now you express a Whiggish belief that the best won out. But how do you know? In a thousand years if all those things became unpopular and reversed a future version of you could announce that the better (opposite) argument eventually won out.
There's lots of things that both the masses & elites have mistaken beliefs about. Who actually does know things? People who can make accurate predictions.
One example that just keeps confusing people is the gender wage gap. Prominent people keeps repeating directly or implying the “equal pay for equal work” is the problem - which hasn’t been the case for decades and is already illegal. When instead the much harder to solve mix of conditions like gender-profession-preferences, or maternity related career impacts, firm-preferences (for benefits/work-life-balance) and other factors need to considered. There just aren’t many firms out there outright paying less for the same title, even if there is a desire to find a sexist bogeyman. But engaging in the complex analysis, just seems like a nonstarter compared to the rhetorical value of the alternative.
This might be the most accurate definition I have seen of misinformation that is scarily rampant.
For example, VAERS does collect reports of problems people think they have had from vaccines.
However, that is only a starting point. These reports have to be investigated. Some might turn out to be real, and in my opinion (just my opinion) most would be paranoid ppl imagining causation.
If you want to spread conspiracy theories about the vaccines you'd stop right at that collection of reports.
That's just the point: It simply isn't as easy as censoring false claims, because few people are making genuinely false claims. So you have to censor on a different basis; presumably that people have come to conclusions you don't like. That's a lot less straightforward than being able to censor false claims.
Although I would say that the censorship that has gone on in the last two years has made everything much, much worse. There is no doubt that true (or at least plausible) claims were censored, such as the lab leak hypothesis. All that has accomplished is many more people taking the conspiracy theorists, who have been proven right at least once, much more seriously.
Or, maybe, *don't censor at all.* Remove things that meet the legal standards for categories like true threats, child pornography, and defamation (with a court order). And things that fail to meet the particular community's standards. None of this should involve the government except getting a court order for defamation.
So loosen the standards of allowed misinformation? It has already delayed climate action, resulted in a large number of unnecessary covid deaths and sparked a determined attack on US democracy. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
There are no "standards of allowed misinformation". The 1st amendment means that the government *cannot* establish such. And as both a practical and theoretical matter, trying to establish such is utterly wrong. Giving *anyone* coercive power over the communication of others runs tremendous risk. And doing it over such things is handing a child a nuke...with a trigger set to go off at the slightest jog. Or maybe like building an AI *intentionally designed to kill people*.
It is the attempted suppression and successful politicization of these issues that have caused these things, not allowing people to hold unapproved ideas. Climate change in particular: When those most vocal about its catastrophic effects oppose the most effective means of reducing carbon emissions, it becomes extremely clear that, for most climate activists, climate change is merely a useful cudgel which will allow them to enact their political agendas. And this isn't to say that climate change isn't an enormous threat! The problem is, I don't know! When scientists and researchers who deviate from approved opinion are vilified and ostracized rather than responded to rationally, when the censorship regime you want is in place and ensures a monoculture in science on this subject, when the "official" sources speak with one voice (which is **never** how science works), when there are clear problems with the narrative, but those who question it are delegitimized, exactly as you want, I, who have spent quite a few hours over several years looking into this, don't know what the truth is, but I *do* know that official pronouncements and received narratives cannot be trusted.
The effects you are decrying *are largely a result of the attempt to control the narrative just as you desire.*
Aaaah yes! The catastrophic decline on trust! Now there is something worth considering. There has been a clear determined effort to undermine science since the 60s. It began with the advertising techniques used to raise doubt about cigarettes and cancer, the techniques were then picked up by the fundamentalists to attack evolution, then the fossil fuel companies spent billions using the same techniques to attack climate science and, finally, their efforts were so succesful that when the pandemic came around, lots of people chose to not believe the science. And how did that turn out? The US had an appalling per capita death rate compared to other developed nations. Science makes mistakes and was initially wrong about the nature of covid transmission......but countries who based their pixies on science achieved much.lower death rates and much more rapid economic recovery.
And so…the response is to adopt the same partisan attitude, except in service of science? To say that certain views should not allowed to be aired?
Let’s look at cigarettes and cancer. You’re certainly right that the cigarette companies fought the cigarettes/cancer link. Now fast forward to, say, 2000. Is there anybody who still thought that cigarettes did *not* cause cancer? No. And yet there was no campaign of censorship against the pro-cigarette movement! Somehow, people figured it out! Yes, it took time; reaching the truth always does. But the censorship and groupthink campagins in climate change, covid, and so many other things nowadays not only feels profoundly Orwellian, it destroys the process of liberal science which society uses to discover the truth, by appointing a relatively small number of elites who get to dictate what the truth is to everyone. The problem (other than whether you can trust those elites, as the lies propagated by them regarding Covid show) is that people start doubting the official narrative en masse. There will always be randos who won’t believe what you want, but now you’ve got damn near half the country extremely skeptical of anything elites try to tell them, first because they were caught in obvious lies, second because if you’re trying to suppress information, the only sensible reason is that you’re trying to hide the truth. Which just makes sense, right? If you weren’t afraid of it, you wouldn’t try to suppress it. If it wasn’t true, you would simply debunk it with rational arguments, not try to ensure no one can hear it. So there’s a reasonable, rational presumption that anything someone doesn’t want you to hear is likely the truth.
Information about the lab leak may have been censored in China but it was widely discussed in scientific journals and major media outlets across the western world and still has not been ruled out. The scientific consensus is that it is significantly less likely than a natural origin. If you want equal time for all possible hypotheses on issues of scientific concern you are likely to be disappointed. I would be interested in the point on which you think conspiracy theorists have been proven correct as I am unaware of it.
You're really not aware of the ban on that subject on YouTube and elsewhere? That YouTube censored any information about Covid not verified by the FDA? And that this was in line with government officials calling it obviously false misinformation?
And this is just one instance. We could go on about government misinformation and suppression of information regarding masks, natural immunity, etc. etc.
Youtube is a publisher and did what publishers do.....decided not to publish certain content. Information about the lab leak hypothesis was widely available elsewhere. Oh and during a pandemic in which misinformation caused a large number of avoidable deaths sticking to the best available evidence and blocking dangerous fringe ideas is ......ethical.publishing
I’m confused as to what your argument is. “Censorship wasn’t happening!” “Oh, it was, but it wasn’t universal! Also, it was a good thing!”
These are strange responses to “censorship backfired.” And the arguments you’re using seem suspiciously like the standard talking points I’ve heard over and over on these subjects, almost like you’re trying to advance a certin agenda rather than discover the truth.
"...do you think the merchants of misinformation are actually worth defending on the basis of the technical definition of lying?"
Some of don't trust that the folks who will be in charge of the censoring have our own best interests at heart. Would you be in favor of censorship if you were fairly convinced that the "other side" would get to decide what to censor?
I am not suggesting government censorship. I believe publishers have a responsibility to be ethical and not print material for which there is no evidence. Free speech does not, and never has, included the right to publication, not here, not anywhere. The decision to publish is the responsibility.of the publisher. For example, if a source you rely on provides inaccurate medical advice that results in a serious illness, they should be liable, in a similar way to Jones being found liable in the Sandy Hook case.
> I am not suggesting government censorship. I believe publishers have a responsibility to be ethical and not print material for which there is no evidence.
Well I suppose it depends on what you consider evidence. If you consider weak correlations, vague insinuations and unsupported assertions to be evidence then I suppose you may be right.
Plate tectonics started out with Abraham Ortelius noticing the coast of South America, North America, and Africa might slot together nicely. Mind you, this was in the 16th century when maps were not so great and he of course did not propose a detailed mechanism, and yet, his intuition was absolutely correct. It's good he lived in a time when hall monitors were far fewer in number so that his intuition could survive to help usher in the modern geophysical view of the world.
I saw an interesting example of a media source lying earlier this year, albeit not (I think) intentionally.
First, the background. In the Budapest Memorandum, in 1994, the US, UK and Russia all agreed they would not invade Ukraine. They didn't commit to defend it if it were attacked: they just each promised that they, themselves, would not do so. Then, in 2020, Russia broke this agreement by invading Ukraine.
In the following months many, many media sources mentioned that the US and UK had made "security guarantees" to Ukraine. This is technically true, in that the US and UK had guaranteed that Ukraine was secure against any threat from them, but (I think) deliberately misleading, because it could also be taken to mean that they had guaranteed Ukraine's security from *other* threats, and were now required to join its war against Russia. The phrase "security guarantees" in media articles was used in such a manner that the true meaning wasn't clear, and the latter (false) interpretation was at least left possible, if not implied to be correct. Unsurprisingly, some people believed this to be the case: I saw video of one (non-journalist?) person heckling the UK PM, invoking this misinterpretation to claim that he was obliged to enter the war on the Ukrainian side.
Journalists are, of course, only human, and a large fraction of media output consists of rewrites and reinterpretations of articles from other journalists, simply because that's easier than looking up facts directly. And this, I think, led to the one case I saw of a media source stating flatly that the misinterpretation of the Budapest Memorandum, above, was correct. (I'm sorry for not having the original link to hand; downweight the reliability of this story appropriately.) The journalist had probably read a range of articles, had been fooled exactly the way the general public were being fooled, hadn't taken the time to look up the original text of the Memorandum, and presented this falsehood as fact. After all, the media wouldn't actually *lie* to them, right?
To be fair, there is a little more to this than simply a journalist's confusion. Even as the memorandum was drafted, there was an ambiguity introduced by the distinction between the non-obliging 'assurance' and the stronger 'guarantee' in English, which is not present in the Russian, and which required all parties to acknowledge the nuance. See: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/05_trilateral_process_pifer.pdf p. 23-24
Not the first time a minor inconsistency between drafting languages has proven consequential - consider for example the famous difference between the English and French wordings of UNSCR 242, the former calling on Israel to with withdraw from "occupied territories" implying merely some, while the latter referring to "_the_ occupied territories", implying all.
> Even as the memorandum was drafted, there was an ambiguity introduced by the distinction between the non-obliging 'assurance' and the stronger 'guarantee' in English, which is not present in the Russian, and which required all parties to acknowledge the nuance.
> English draws a distinction between “guarantee” and “assurance,” while both words translate into “guarantee” in Ukrainian and Russian. U.S. officials read for the formal negotiating record a statement to the effect that, whenever “guarantee” appeared in the Ukrainian and Russian language texts of the Trilateral Statement, it was to be understood in the sense of the English word “assurance.” The Ukrainian and Russian delegations confirmed that understanding.
But the document does not bother to explain what the English-language distinction is supposed to be, and it's obviously false as a factual matter that there is one.
That's my fault, I cited the page references for Steven Pifer's account hastily and incompletely. Sorry about that. On page 17 you'll find the following:
"American officials decided the assurances would have to be packaged in a document that was not legally-binding. Neither the Bush nor Clinton administrations wanted a legal treaty that would have to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. State Department lawyers thus took careful interest in the actual language, in order to keep the commitments of a political nature. U.S. officials also continually used the term “assurances” instead of “guarantees,” as the latter implied a deeper, even legally-binding commitment of the kind that the United States extended to its NATO allies."
As I'm sure I don't need to tell you, lawyers and diplomats tend to parse the English language a little differently from the rest of us - with an eye to respecting various niche conventions. This, from the perspective of State, is one of them.
- It is harder to maintain the position that the thing you've breached does not constitute a treaty binding under international (not domestic) law as per the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
- It is harder to maintain the position that the breach wasn't in fact a breach, against an argument (based on VCLT articles of interpretation 31-33) that the language of guarantees, interpreted in good faith, implies an obligation to act based on how you and others have used it in the context of other agreements.
- Related, breaching the thing calls into question the value of your guarantees in other contexts, where you used 'guarantee' in conjunction with specific commitments to act.
And, as Pifer notes, all of this, in the US, has implications if you're trying to avoid Senate involvement.
This is still a consideration today, and journalists are still cavalier about the terms even while they cite diplomats drawing the distinction verbatim:
What Linde got for the interim period while NATO application processes, and she states this explicitly, were 'assurances', but headlines are gonna headline.
The word "assurances" appears only in the title. Regardless of whether or not this should be considered synonymous with "guarantees", I think the actual clauses are quite clear that none of the signatories are being bound to come to the defence of Ukraine - which is the way the media were misinterpreting it.
"In the following months many, many media sources mentioned that the US and UK had made 'security guarantees' to Ukraine. This is technically true..."
I'm not even sure that it is true that Ukraine had a security guarantee from the US. The Senate never ratified anything, so there is clearly no *treaty*. Can a US president commit future US governments just on their say-so? I don't think they can in a legal sense. My position is that Ukraine had a guarantee from Bill Clinton (and, presumably from John Major and Boris Yeltsin), but that none of the folks agreeing to this had the authority to commit their future governments' actions without further legal actions that were never taken.
I think it's a bit of a mess. The President generally has wide latitude in foreign relations, and historically has initiated military action of various types and lengths, from invasion to peacekeeping forces, sometimes backed up by some kind of resolution Congress passes (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the AUMF), and sometimes not (the invasion of Grenada). The President can also make what are called "executive agreements" which have the force of a Federal law during his Administration, but which cannot bind his successors unless they are preauthorized by Congress (e.g. NAFTA), that is, are actually encoded as law.
A treaty is considered to formally bind the United States, and I believe has a status above Federal statute (so if a law conflicts with a treaty the treat prevails), and the Constitution says these can only come into force when 2/3 of the Senate concurs. But there was the weird case of President Carter unilaterally abrogating the treaty between Taiwan and the US:
Yes, much like the old Helsinki Accords themselves (of which Budapest is largely an adaptation that acknowledges the existence and rights of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine instead of the Soviet Union), the Joint Framework with North Korea, and the more recent Iran deal, Budapest represented a non-binding political agreement, not a treaty under US law. It may, however, be considered a treaty under international law, which, as set out in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (which the US has also signed-but-not-ratified), has a much broader scope of what 'treaty' means.
One can certainly question the value of these kinds of commitments, especially if they lack explicit enforcement mechanisms beyond just a vague 'if anyone breaches this, we'll kick it to the UNSC', which is great until one of the breaching signatories or its bestest big buddy has a veto. And one can certainly single out the US for being... somewhat mercurial about its international commitments (the ones it bothers entering into, anyway) and about its view of international law as such.
But international obligations are not a starkly binary idea, and executive and political agreements can serve to declare states' intentions in a usefully explicit way, with both diplomatic/reputational and real costs attached to flaking out, however legal it might technically be. Especially if you're not the United States.
Which is exactly what happened to President Kuchma when the Ukrainian parliament smelled a rat and tried to get something more solid, like actual security guarantees, out of the US and the UK before the country gave up the full leverage of its ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal. He was told in no uncertain terms that US-Ukrainian relations would suffer and carrots would disappear if his parliament kicked up trouble over this perfectly non-binding political agreement. And so he squared it with the Rada and signed.
That's right, but what discussions about the Budapest memorandum usually miss is that Ukraine (and Belarus) had agreed to give up their nuclear weapons to Russia in 1991, as part of the raft of treaties which dissolved USSR. Here is the text of the specific treaty: http://web.archive.org/web/20140725212330/http://base.spinform.ru/show_doc.fwx?rgn=27062 By this treaty Ukraine and Belarus obliged themselves to join the non-proliferation treaty as non-nuclear states and to transfer all tactical nuclear weapons to Russia by July 1, 1992, although it does not discuss strategic nukes. If memory serves, this agreement was brokered by USA. The Budapest memorandum itself was the result of Ukraine having second thoughts about this treaty, signed when the returns from its independence referendum weren't yet three weeks old (inb4: I'm not saying Ukraine wasn't bound by that treaty or shouldn't have been bound by that treaty). Here are links to some useful materials on the topic I dug up some time ago:
Thank you for the links, this is very good. But, as you note, broad NPT commitments aside, the Alma-Ata agreement only dealt directly with tactical weapons, not strategic weapons (roughly 1900 warheads' worth of the latter on Ukrainian territory) whose status remained a muddle.
The question of operational control over these strategic nuclear weapons is nonetheless a fascinating one, which I agree doesn't get adequately considered in these discussions. The Minsk agreement subsequent to Alma-Ata, made it so that the Russian president was the one with the overall button but was required to consult with the heads of the three other republics. This was clearly preposterous and untenable if the weapons were to have any deterrence value, and it was inevitable that the CIS republics would end up overriding it with another arrangement. Moreover, American analysts believed that Ukraine was capable of asserting control over at least some of the strategic arsenal. See discussion in this contemporary Stimson Center report, pages 30-31, which concludes with:
"Despite the significant obstacles, a strongly motivated Ukraine would probably be capable, albeit with substantial sacrifices, of resubordinating and supporting at least some of its ICBMs for a number of years. It has sufficient economic resources, part of the SOF production and maintenance infrastructure, the technical and military cadres, as well as the electronics and programming centers. One of the available options might be to modify the ICBM nuclear warheads for employment as gravity bombs deliverable by aircraft. But in any case, Ukraine’s potential SOF would remain unstable and vulnerable for many years, and consequently would represent a highly provocative strategic target."
So I think the Ukrainian leverage I talked about was significant, but you're right to point out that it wasn't nearly of the same weight as "we've got nearly two thousand nukes credibly pointed at your cities."
Ukraine probably _was_ technically capable of eventually establishing operational control over some of the strategic nuclear weapons, as that report says, but it is questionable (to put it mildly) whether Russia would have allowed that to happen. The FAS page I linked to states that
> Ukraine initially announced its intention to obtain operational control over the strategic nuclear weapons deployed in its territory. Responding to these intentions, Russian military officials responded that attempts to interfere with, or to damage the command and control systems of, Russian strategic troops located abroad would constitute a direct military threat to the Russian Federation.
It does not cite sources for this statement but I find nothing whatever implausible in it. Ukraine would not have been able to keep such activities secret from Russia at that time. Also, the strategic troops themselves would have had little reason to respect commands from newly independent Ukrainian military authorities, as they were used to being subordinate directly to Moscow.
This is a good point: without ratification by the Senate the Budapest Memorandum is not legally binding on the US, and I assume something similar applies for the other countries involved.
Having a closer look at the text, however, I see that the relevant clauses aren't presented as (e.g. clause 1) a commitment to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, but as a *reaffirmation* of their commitment to do so - the original commitment presumably having been made in a separate, ratified treaty.
Does Bayern have a well-known illuminati? That would explain why there's that big golden triangle with an eye on St. Josef's Church. (it's baroque, in case you're wondering about timeframe)
>Censorship proponents imagine a world where “good sources” are doing something fundamentally different from “bad sources”; the good sources are going out in the world and reporting true facts, the bad sources are just making things up.
Well, no, not exactly. Censorship proponents imagine a world in which some people come to Approved Conclusions, and other people come to Unapproved Conclusions, and want to propagate the former and ban the latter. "Truth" doesn't enter into it, except that for them, "Approved Conclusions" and "Truth" are synonymous.
They're not interested in genuine truth. They just want narratives they consider dangerous, regardless of some hypothetical objective truth value, to be disallowed.
Yes. It is stunning how many don't have much interest in the genuine truth. (Do I? I like to think so.)
Maybe this is why lies in the news media are part of their business model itself now.
Every new media outlet claims it is different but they just have their own biases and desire to change the world according to THEIR ideas of good and bad.
False equivalence. You are lumping in ethical publishers who publish extensively researched material which, on the evidence, they believe to be true, with unethical mouthpieces for vested interests. Many ethical publishers do wish to change the world......for the better. The others want to change the world to increase the wealth of their sponsors. Not the same thing is it?
I think it is obvious. Ethical publishers support evidence based policies to improve community welfare and support their views by stating the sources of the evidence they rely on.
And—given the post you’re responding to—how do you tell the difference between these two things, given that the unethical ones use evidence, purport to be trying to improve community welfare, and state the sources of evidence they rely on?
More pointedly, just which are these ethical, trustworthy news sources you speak of?
"given that the unethical ones use evidence, purport to be trying to improve community welfare, and state the sources of evidence they rely on?"
Well I suppose the understanding of community welfare may vary but I think there is a significant difference between policies that are likely to work and the policies promoted by unethical publishers like infowars, Fox News and so on. There is an enormous amount of historical evidence about the kind of policies that improve community welfare. It is hard to imagine that anyone genuinely believes that the climate change denial has been a win for the community.....or the repeal of gun laws,,,,or arguing against effective public health measures during the pandemic
If we are going to try to address this shouldn't we start with acknowledged falsehoods rather than running through anecdotes? Public newspapers offer retractions (on page 74, in small print) is there not some organization that tracks these so we can start with a baseline of how often a newspaper is forced to admit that they printed an outright untrue statement?
I hope you are saying that a newspaper that prints a retraction is automatically better than one which doesn't, so the greater number of retractions is likely to be a sign of better quality.
Because trying to characterise retractions as a negative to be condemned is a terrible idea. Retractions and corrections are a positive good to be encouraged.
I'm not trying to characterize them in anyway, I'm simply stating that we should have a database which includes all the fabrications which were caught and forced an admission.
Even if we grant such assertions, we still have retractions representing a database of how often factually incorrect statements get through the editing process which allows for a baseline for determining intent should we find (for example) a potential political bias in false facts getting through.
We can also still go through such a database and discern the two types of mistakes- those that materially change or strengthen/weaken a story, and those that are incidental to the story. Which again should almost certainly be superior to 'we should count this as a lie' or 'does this article actually represent the bulk of articles on the subject from 2 years ago'.
> Even if we grant such assertions, we still have retractions representing a database of how often factually incorrect statements get through the editing process.
The problem is that what you get by counting retractions is a product of two terms: (how often factually incorrect statements get through) * (proportion of factually incorrect statements that get retracted).
And those two numbers are likely to be anticorrelated - in a media source with high standards the former will go down and the latter will go up - so the product probably isn't telling you much.
Your followup article highlights that your original article was addressing the wrong question. As shown by so many of your examples above, there is always *someone* saying just about *anything* it's imaginable to say. So anyone who wants to lie without lying simply needs to find some X saying the lay and report "X says....". The problem is not the generation of misinformation but the *sourcing* of it.
I think the right way to assess news sources' reliability is to ask "how often do they report someone saying something false *without indicating that it is false*". I think you would find that our "quality" news sites do this far less than the conspiracy sites, and fox news is somewhere in the middle.
Actually there are two related question: how often do they fail to correct something false because *they* are misinformed (incompetent) and how often do they fail to correct something false when they actually know better (malicious). Distinguishing requires knowledge of the reporters' inner state, so is difficult.
You may argue that news should never publish statements they know to be false, but sometimes those statements are highly newsworthy---for example, the reporting on recent anti-semitic remarks by Ye and others would be much weaker if it couldn't say what those remarks are.
Note that this broader definition of "lying by quotation" is still much narrower than the approach on which you focus, of misleading with correct but incomplete information. Our traditional news sources do engage in that behavior, but it's a different problem than straight out lying (by quoting).
I do research on misinformation, and I believe the problem of sourcing requires far more attention. We should be working towards an ecosystem where every statement is attributed to an entity, and also where entities can indicate their agreement and disagreement with others' statements, all in a machine readable fashion, so that we can begin to build tools that can automate the process of a user asking "does anyone I trust assert, directly or through a chain of trust, that this statement is accurate?"
"Quality" news sites report someone saying something false all the time. They infamously have a problem of citing unnamed government officials, "sources familiar with the matter", etc. to push what, if one wants to stay charitable, can only be described as propaganda. This is even harder to defend from the charge of outright making stuff up than - to compare with examples from the post - Infowars citing a specific, actually existing individual.
This seems like a post on "conflict theory" versus "error theory." Without getting into the minutia of what constitutes a lie, a belief, or other epistemological concerns, it seems like the most important measure of these models is "Which one makes better predictions?"
That is, is "These media actors systematically reports information in predictable ways to advance an agenda," lead to a better model than, "These media actors are relaying information to the best of their ability to construct an accurate model of the world, but through a biased lens from misaligned priors, cognitive dissonance, and other conceptual errors."
It seems like the former model will be vastly better in virtually any possible comparable arena.
I'm largely in favor of the same extensive liberal attitudes Scott is defending here, but I would consider, "We can't tell if people are ideologically biased or if they're intentionally disingenuous," to be a particularly weak point.
I think the point is indeed what you suggest. It is weak as a tool for general media consumption - but is a much stronger point when considering the best case scenarios for censorship, which from the last article seems to Scott’s overarching point.
You can’t draw a clear, objective, live between ideological (or maybe better stated epistemologically) biased and intentional disingenuous in a way a censor (at say a big social media company) could use. The false assumption that I think is being reacted against is the idea you can objectively fact check media. But you if Scott is right the censor probably can’t and would instead either needs to engage more directly with the source material or just engage taking sides.
I think Scott is right in a pendantic sense, and I’m no fan of censorship for the classic liberal reasons, but it seems you could take the approach that has started to emerge of “this article contains references to theories that are likely to be untrue/misleading/contested” with links to more context. It seems like that might be the best we can do.
I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct.
Cassidy Hutchinson testified UNDER OATH that Trump lunged* from the back seat of The Beast and tried to grab the steering wheel! It's not a reporter's job to know if that is physically possible or not, just to report the sworn testimony!
*also, technically she testified that someone e;lse told her this, but oddly enough, that's not how the stories were written.
Not to pick on you particularly, but I'm seeing *a lot* of this sort of thing in the comments here, and it's astounding to me. It feels like the worst parts of Twitter.
This feels like a fair summary of this thread to me::
Scott: The media isn't outright lying, just being misleading.
HW: What about this rape case where they lied?
Scott: They didn't lie in that case, they just reported on lies in a way that was misleading.
You: But isn't it their job not to mislead?
?!?!?! Why do you think "the media isn't doing their job well" is in any way a counter-argument to anything anyone has said here?!
If the reporter knows they are repeating lies and doesn't even believe in the truth of what they are reporting, then we are in Weekly World News territory, and if that is our standard for truth there is no reason to consume any news media ever.
My point here is that Rolling Stone *is* a relatively reliable publication, has proven over the course of its existence that it is a relatively reliable publication and that this one story, probably because the politics of the moment was obsessed with New Feminism, is utter mendacity.
Well, the story the woman made up was fairly implausible. One has to believe that the world is very different than it is to have believed the story was true. I don't believe the reporter believed the story was true.
More importantly, as mentioned, Rolling Stone is known to have good fact checkers yet for some reason decided not to employ them for this this very far-fetched sounding story. I think, for some reason, Rolling Stone editors temporarily took the motto of the old Weekly World News editors, which was "Never question yourself out of a good story."
ETA: Also, this story is not equivalent to the story which simply quoted Rand Paul. The Rolling Stone story was written as if it were true; it wasn't written: "According to her..." this and "According to her..." that.
ETA: The "Almost Famous" scene to which I refer occurs at the end of the movie (spoiler) after the 15-year-old prodigy reporter sends in his story, which is essentially the story of the movie up until then, and Rolling Stone rejects it because their fact checkers are told it was all a lie. It's just a movie, of course, but it was a movie based on writer Cameron Crowe's actual experiences as a writer for Rolling Stone.
ETA: I heard the dictum "Never question yourself out of a good story" espoused by a reporter who was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman in the 90s. Thinking more about it, he may have worked for a British tabloid and not The Weekly World News. His stories tended to be about things like Elvis sightings.
The story contained such implausibilities, and the reporter had such a hard time getting the woman to provide the claimed evidence that would corroborate it (e.g. the dress she alleged she was wearing when she was thrown down on a glass table that shattered under her, raped on top of the broken glass, then went outside to her friends with blood streaming down her back - this dress never was produced at all in the end), and the reporter already had a 'story idea' in mind to do a story about alleged rapes on campus and went looking for someplace that had a good juicy alleged story of such happening, and the editors and everyone steaming right ahead with the story even in the face of any cautions raised - maybe you couldn't call it *direct* lying but it certainly was not, by any measure, objective reporting.
"Woman says she was raped, Rolling Stone believed her" is the best case version. But the truth was more like "Woman says she was raped by demonic entity that appeared out of a giant hole in the ground in the middle of Main Street, no such hole is visible in Main Street, Rolling Stone goes ahead with story anyway".
"LAST JULY 8, SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia. Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show “what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,” according to Erdely’s notes of the conversation.
...Jackie proved to be a challenging source. At times, she did not respond to Erdely’s calls, texts and emails. At two points, the reporter feared Jackie might withdraw her cooperation. Also, Jackie refused to provide Erdely the name of the lifeguard who had organized the attack on her. She said she was still afraid of him. That led to tense exchanges between Erdely and Jackie, but the confrontation ended when Rolling Stone’s editors decided to go ahead without knowing the lifeguard’s name or verifying his existence. After that concession, Jackie cooperated fully until publication.
...Rolling Stone’s repudiation of the main narrative in “A Rape on Campus” is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all. The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from.
In late March, after a four-month investigation, the Charlottesville, Va., police department said that it had “exhausted all investigative leads” and had concluded, “There is no substantive basis to support the account alleged in the Rolling Stone article.”
...Yet the explanation that Rolling Stone failed because it deferred to a victim cannot adequately account for what went wrong. Erdely’s reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie’s position.
...[Erdely] even asked to examine the bloodstained red dress Jackie said she had worn on the night she said she was attacked. ...Eventually, Jackie told Erdely that her mother had thrown away the red dress. She also said that her mother would be willing to talk to Erdely, but the reporter said that when she called and left messages several times, the mother did not respond."
Yeah you are going back a decade to find one imperfect example. Maybe go back further to Stephen Glass at The New Republic, but of course, his level of fabrication was so unusual that a movie was made about the incident.
This just seems like different definitions of lying.
Lying by omission is still lying.
If I go to a Dr because I think I have bladder cancer and am informed that I do not have bladder cancer but the Dr neglects to mention my lung cancer, that's a lie! This is how the media lies. And it does so in every industry (MMA, games, politics) and in almost every story.
I think this is semantically wrong. "Lie" is a fairly narrow term; omitting relevant information is usually not lying, even when it's actively deceitful.
If you repeat a lie someone else said as a quote, are you lying? No, but only in the most "technically correct" sense. "Technically correct" is supposed to be the best kind of correct, but maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe "contextually correct" should be the best kind of correct and we should call instances like this lying-by-proxy.
My all-time favourite was getting a reporter to stand outside a building and repeat something so they could say "a source close to Number Ten said...."
There's no denying that the media lies by omission and aligns the facts in misleading ways in order to construct narratives that are ultimately untrue.
So since this entire argument relies on the narrow distinction between "lying" and merely being "dishonest", a more succinct title would have been: The Media Rarely Strays From the Facts
But that headline isn't controversial and wouldn't drive nearly as much engagement now would it? 😏
The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call.
For example this:
"The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black."
was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black."
In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something.
He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male."
There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident.
At least according to this source, Zimmerman had actually said "This guy looks like he's up to no good" shortly before saying "He looks black". The critical and misleading thing was that NBC deleted the dispatcher's question about Travyon's race in between those two statements by Zimmerman, which provided important context for the latter of those 2 statements.
Now, technically, you never explicitly said that they inserted fabricated/inserted "This guy looks like he's up to no good" just before "He looks black", and you certainly didn't intend to convey that. However, the ironic thing here is that, to me, the way you'd written your comment initially gave the impression that the first case had been even more extreme than it was! This is not to say that they (professionals producing national news) were not grievously in the wrong, and it is not to say that your comment was particularly bad.
The second case, where they spliced together several parts of the audio clip into one even more unrepresentative combination, sounds even more egregious, btw. People should've been fired over that sort of malfeasance, but I doubt they got anything more than some embarrassment :(
Scott, I don't think what you're saying about the InfoWars example makes sense. Specifically (https://archives.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/). You say they are not directly lying because they are basing their statement - that the birth certificate is a hoax - on true, yet in truth irrelevant, observations.
My question is, what would directly lying even look like here, if this isn't it? The lie is in the headline - "New Obama Birth Certificate is a Forgery" - and the fact that the supporting 'evidence' has some basis in what one can observe looking at the image seems obvious, because if they said something like "it's a fake because of the bright red space alien in the margins" no one would believe them because no such alien exists.
If they weren't directly lying, they might have made the headline "New Obama Birth Certificate Shows Possible Signs of Being Fake" or something like that.
Another nit. "However, when the government released PDF is taken into the image editing program Adobe Illustrator, we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper..." This is effectively a lie. They may have been mistaken - misled by Illustrator guessing layers, thinking it was authoritative - but the fact that they have avoided issuing any correction at this point suggests to me that they are not merely telling misleading truths and making mistakes.
Some media - the NYT - may mislead far more often than it lies. But InfoWars? This seems to me to be what lying looks like.
I was referring to the claim "we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper". These elements do not in fact reveal that, as could be tested by scanning similar documents (or to save time, asking someone at Adobe). So a false claim is being made, which is I think the definition of lying we are using here.
I agree with you that the media has a tendency to present facts that it wants to highlight and direct our focus on, but rarely does it present falsehoods in a clinical sense. But there is more to it. It is able to get quotes from authority figures that align with the way it wants us to think about the story. When it gets quotes from John Brennan and others that the Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian intelligence operation, it is encouraging us to place our trust in that authority figure. How about the media doing it's own digging and finding out? Getting a quote is easy, quick and gives the journalist a cover. Some honest journalist at a lowly rated website or a local paper may end up doing the digging, but he or she doesn't have the reach. The editors at mainstream papers should insist on their own journalists doing the digging instead of lazily getting quotes from authority figures opining freely.
I think that this illustrates that the original question is much less clear cut and admits different interpretations that I would assume.
Consider an article that basically says "Because the sky is blue, we know that the sun is green." Does it lie? I would intuitively say yes, and yet I'd expect you to possibly say no based on examples in this article, because it provides correct facts and incorrect inferences from them. If there's a line of how ludicrous an inference has to be to be considered a lie, then that line is very much in the eye of the beholder, so will be _very_ thick.
I think what a lot of the bad "misinformation" behavior feels like is what has been described as "writing the conclusion first" sort of approach. I don't think it makes sense to imagine that Infowars has the same kind of epistemological commitments that you do. It is just much more parsimonious to believe the site has an intentional stance of misinforming.
This is certainly a matter of degree and one doesn't have to look hard to find NYT content with a quite similar intentional stance. So it isn't like divvying the world up into sinners (believe the opposite of what they say) and saints (believe) is a winning strategy.
My view is that the best thing is for outlets/sites/people to be quite opinionated but to explain those priors and updates honestly. This feels also like it ought to be easy but of course turns out to be hard.
Philosophical question: in real life, have almost *all* “lies” throughout history been technically true statements that merely omitted some crucial context? If so, then should we use the word “lie” only for technically false statements, or for that broader thing? And whichever choice you make: which word should we use for the other thing?
Almost all lies throughout history have been small children denying that they did a thing everyone watched them do. Lies should only refer to technically false statements, and the broader one is deception, misinformation, misleading, verbal chicanery, horseshit, etc.
"Lie" is much too useful, and too harsh, a word to be wasted on basically harmless things that are almost only ever done by small children. And none of your proposed alternatives are nearly harsh enough to describe people who engage in calculated malicious deception.
"Lie" becomes useless if you gut it of its meaning for some short-term gall bladder bullshit. We don't need another goddamn version of Double Plus Ungood. And why the hell would you assume actual lies are less harmful than deceptions? Scammers tell straight lies and rob people of millions. Jim Jones told straight lies and killed 800 people. What's your super-extra harsh terminology for the people who are worse than the news?
I don't distinguish between scammers who rob people of millions by telling "straight lies", and scammers who rob people of millions by other forms of malicious deception. Or murderous cult leaders, etc. It's the intent and the outcome that matter, not the precise details of the method.
It's the opposite: "lie" is much too useful and too harsh a word to be wasted on a vague category of acts which is obviously capable of stretching to very great lengths. If you apply it to acts in this vague category on the same footing as to actual lying you will no longer have the harshness of "lie" to combat actual lying. Yes, acts in this vague category are often motivated by the same sort of motivations that induce people to lie, and can have similar results, but these are different acts. People who mislead by omission of context still respect truth, and theoretically you can still argue with them about context and shit. People who mislead by telling direct falsehoods don't and arguing with them is meaningless, even counterproductive; you have to escalate to violence of some kind (a lawsuit is one option) to fight them.
I don't much *care* whether we have the harshness of "lie" to refer to saying-literally-false things. Scott's whole *point*, since you seem to be missing it, is that the really damaging misinformation in our society is almost never of that form. But it's still misinformation, resulting from a deliberate and malicious attempt to deceive. I want the harshest language our society can manage for disinformation, applied to the worst sort of disinformation that does the most damage.
It would be disappointing if that means that we're stuck with only a mildly pejorative connotation to the language we use to describe malevolent deceivers. But it doesn't help that there's a stronger word, if that word can only be used against small children and other fools incapable of making their lies really hurt.
You are unwise to not care much about it. Misleading by saying literally false things is much, much more harmful than misleading without saying literally false things. You don't appreciate it because you live in a society where direct lying is suppressed to such an extent that it is not an important contributor to the more general problem of misleading public statements. People from ex-USSR who haven't switched over to putinism could tell you. It's like if you insisted on using the same rules and language for nuclear and non-nuclear weapons because the most damage within living memory (okay, almost within...) has been done by non-nuclear weapons and you didn't want to be stuck with only mildly pejorative connotations of words describing non-nuclear aggression. Scott made the same point in 2016 about calling Trump an "overt white supremacist" etc.
Scott I just wanted to post that I agree with your definition of "lying" for the exact reasoning you describe. If you have a wishy washy definition of lying it lets people Russel conjugate with it. Sticking with a rigid definition, even one that might not cover everything you'd like it to, is the right call here.
I can't speak for tony but this post rebuts something epistemically very different to what I'd be saying with his words.
When "the media" lies it isn't a shorthand for John A Journalist, human liar. (If that person were lying, it would be their lie, not "the media") An institution lies in a way that every human person involved is more or less telling the truth. Then you wake up in the morning and read the wrong news.
So when you look into 10 cases and say "actually in every case Jane B. Journalist was honestly bamboozled, instead of lying." It's a little like saying "actually in every case the tsunamis were caused by a tidal wave, instead of climate change." Or "actually in every case the applicants were denied due to criminal convictions, instead of racism." What you have discovered with the tidal wave is the end of a long mechanism through which climate change could operate. And so when you turn up the 10 bamboozlings you uncover a way that an institution could lie.
The more interesting question is why you choose to use your space and time for this or that topic. And then compare your motivation to the actual, real-world impact of each post.
Why are you so determined that your readers know precisely how you feel about "trying to reason under uncertainty," while you remain intentionally disinterested in the overall impact of the piece, which is to minimize focus on malicious intent (on pedantic grounds), and to promote both-sides-ism? Why take up so much bandwidth for such small, misleading points? At best, it's suited to happy hour at a bar, where listeners could heartily agree that the Times and InfoWar exist on the same planet (which was your cutesy provocation here). It's Fox News' bread and butter: spending all their finite airtime on provocative perspectives based on magnifying small stances (like immigration or wokeness) beyond all reasonable recognition. As we all know by now, it's a good profit model in 2022 America, but that alone doesn't make it useful.
You don't think headlines count? "FBI SAYS NO ONE KILLED AT SANDY HOOK" is an outright, complete lie. Even _if_ the main text then perhaps attempts to quote sources.
I know we're being trained by the media to assume that every headline everywhere is complete nonsense that we should ignore, but that doesn't really change anything.
Some are doing that. Some are asserting that the right/left-wing Jewish/Nazi-controlled Koch/Soros-funded journaLIEsts are OBVIOUSLY lying all the time. Some are completely missing the point.
I think many of the outright lies don't show up in news sources, they show up in facebook memes that start off on a page called "Patriot news" or something like that.
(I'm using a right wing Facebook page as an example here, since that's what I'm more familiar with, but I'm pretty sure this also applies to some non-journalist left wing twitter accounts, with a slightly different pattern.)
The meme says something like "WHY are we locking down the country and DESTROYING the ECONOMY for a virus that is LESS DEADLY than the FLU? LIKE and SHARE if you AGREE!"
Then it gets shared within an echo chamber of people who already believe that particular lie, and then people outside the echo chamber see it and are horrified at it.
Probably many of these posts are produced by people without better things to do, but some of them I believe are likely generated by bots. There's just too many of them, and some of the more formulaic ones make no sense, like the ones that have a picture of a nativity scene and the text "Facebook BANNED somebody for posting this. Are you BRAVE enough to LIKE and SHARE?"
In the past few years, Facebook puts a little "Fact-Checked: False" notification on top of or under some of the blatantly false posts. Which is
A) Could be considered censorship of a certain kind, which is bad on principle
B) More likely to make the people already sharing that post to dig their heels in and double down on the idea shared in the post.
C) now the people who posted it feel like they are being persecuted.
Great, exactly what the national discourse needed!
I've also heard family members who regularly share political memes tell me they've actually received short bans from facebook.
Sometimes, a post like "Donald Trump is Superman!" will get the little "fact-checked" badge on it, along with a little blurb that says "Donald Trump is not superman, according to experts" or something. Facebook seems to regularly fact-check things that are obviously right-wing political jokes, and not meant to be taken seriously. The most egregious example was when facebook put a link to vaccine information on a Babylon bee article called "Playgrounds these days are too safe" because the article happened to mention vaccines in passing. The fictional author of the satire piece complained that everybody is too scared to step outside their door without three vaccines, whereas back in HIS day playgrounds were coated in broken glass. Slightly critical of vaccine obsession? Yeah. Spreading misinformation? Not at all.
I think that the fact-checking that has been happening on Facebook, and possibly other social media sites, is actually making things worse by making people lose all trust in Facebook and the sources from which items are fact-checked. Who is going to believe the CDC if their logo appears as part of a fact-check below a babylon bee post?
The approach to "fake news" taken by social media sites and others who wish for fact checking or censorship is entirely counterproductive, in my opinion. I think if there's a bunch of lies going around, the problem is more fundamental than just righting some wrongs on facebook.
I am really curious about how conversations that take place on social media are different than the conversations that happen in-person. Usually, when I have an in-person conversation with somebody that I also follow on Facebook, they seem a lot more reasonable than the do online, although a few people I have talked to end up using meme-like talking points.
I realize at this point that this comment has strayed a little from the topic of the post, but I think it's related regarding arguments for censorship that really aren't solid.
One distinction that's *really, really* important to make here is between article content and headlines. Yes, news articles themselves very rarely give outright lies. But headlines are a different story. For instance, the Obama birth certificate article you mentioned doesn't directly lie, but the headline "NEW OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE IS A FORGERY" is an outright lie! Perhaps a lie motivated by honest skepticism, but nonetheless a lie. This applies to other media outlets like the NYT and Fox, not just infowars of course. There is strong incentive for headlines to optimize for clicks, and most people only read headlines, and never the main body of a given article (you can see this happen all the time on Twitter), so lies often spread in this way, even if the text of the articles are properly nuanced.
I think the reaction to your articles is probably going to depend in part on whether people find the distinction useful. I personally do - I think it's good to know that I can read most articles and assume that it's telling me some true things, that I just need to watch out how it's worded and think seriously about what it's omitting. If I use "lying" to mean "is misleading by stretching the presented facts in particular way" *and* "is actually making up facts", and the concept actually merges in my head, then I would have to stop reading articles and couldn't use them as a source of any sort of information.
I'm reasonably sure the people who call both things "lying" are, however, still making that distinction in their head, they just don't find it useful to split out the word itself, because it *also* has the use that it can be used to warn someone away from a source, or condemn someone for bad journalism. One can certainly just say "bad journalism" (or "misleading") for it, but it doesn't pack quite the same punch, and I understand, to some degree, why people would want a word that hits harder for something that can indeed be deeply manipulative.
On net, it's probably valuable to warn more people about how misleading journalism often is. If they don't already know it, using the word "lying" is probably going to be more accessible to convey the magnitude of the problem. (On the flip side, you might make people outright paranoid and they might start to worry about the amount of actual baseline fabrications. My gut feelings says that's probably worse than getting someone to be well-calibrated about their media scepticism, mostly for reasons of social cohesion (if you think people are intentionally lying to your face on a regular basis, I'm reasonably sure it'll make you cynical), but I could be wrong about that.)
Anyway, to reiterate, I find the distinction between "being misleading" and "lying" useful in my model of the world. So thanks for sticking with the narrative!
"However, when the government released PDF is taken into the image editing program Adobe Illustrator, we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper, as one might surmise."
This sentence is incorrect; those separate elements do not reveal the document to not be a single scan on paper.
Thank you for writing this. I had previously thought that InfoWars & co did intentionally write unambiguous fiction, rather than publishing true things leading readers to incorrect conclusions. The distinction is important.
(Admittedly, this post did raise my estimation of the likelihood that some popular conspiracy theories are true, much like "The Control Group is Out of Control" made me less sure that pseudoscience was all false, and "The Cowpox of Doubt" made me less sure about fringe positions in general. I'd be interested in a general analysis of "how sure should we really be that the crazies are wrong?" and also "why is it so common for random false things to have convincing collections of evidence for them just lying around for anyone to gather and spread?", but I realize this may be a very broad topic.)
I'm finding the conversation here and in the subreddit quite frustrating. However, it might be that Scott worded his article badly enough to generate this amount of disagreement or it might be that I am wrong in my interpretation of the articles.
Here is what I take from the two articles:
1. Censorship is extremely hard because separating those who intend to deceive from those who simply err is difficult to do in a rigorous way (i.e. rigorous as opposed to using "judgment calls")
2. This is because, counter-factually, censorship would be easy if bad actors in the media (a) plainly reported miss-truths. But they almost never do this. They instead (b) report true facts, selectively, and then draw inferences from those facts.
People responded with lots of examples of what they took to be (a) and this second post was Scott demonstrating that they were in fact examples of (b) all along (allowing for a few true examples of a)
How can we separate examples of (b) into the set of those intending to deceive and those who err. One way is to some how find out whether they they didn't really believe their stated inferences when they printed them. This seems very hard and I guess what long complicated liable cases look like?
We may discover communications that show the reporters in question selectively hid information in order to argue for a predetermined inference. However, this is also difficult as there then needs to be some standard of due diligence. That is, at what point is it considered misconduct to not seek or report the counter evidence? In fact we have already run into problems with this by tilting entirely the other way and having climate change deniers or homeopaths sit next to actual scientists in order to show "balance" which creates the perception of controversy or scientific disagreement when there is none.
So it seems to me the point of the article is well made. In summary, media censorship is hard because "lies", defined in a way that would make censorship work, would fail to capture all the things that in an ideal world we would wish to it to capture. Alternatively, we lack the means to censor "lies" when it is defined more broadly (and more comfortably) as the intention to deceive.
I think you are broadly correct in your interpretation. I don't think either article was poorly worded, but there is absolutely a frustrating combination of poor reading comprehension and motivated reasoning going on in the comments.
I'm finding the conversation here and in the subreddit quite frustrating. However, it might be that Scott worded his article badly enough to generate this amount of disagreement or it might be that I am wrong in my interpretation of the articles.
Here is what I take from the two articles:
1. Censorship is extremely hard because separating those who intend to deceive from those who simply err is difficult to do in a rigorous way (i.e. rigorous as opposed to using "judgment calls")
2. This is because, counter-factually, censorship would be easy if bad actors in the media (a) plainly reported miss-truths. But they almost never do this. They instead (b) report true facts, selectively, and then draw inferences from those facts.
People responded with lots of examples of what they took to be (a) and this second post was Scott demonstrating that they were in fact examples of (b) all along (allowing for a few true examples of a)
How can we separate examples of (b) into the set of those intending to deceive and those who err. One way is to somehow find out whether they they didn't really believe their stated inferences when they printed them. This seems very hard and I guess what long complicated liable cases look like?
Another is discovering communications that show the reporters in question selectively hid information in order to argue for a predetermined inference. This is also problematic as there then needs to be some standard of due diligence. That is, at what point is it considered misconduct to not seek or report the counter evidence? In fact we have already run into problems with this by tilting entirely the other way and having climate change deniers or homeopaths sit next to actual scientists in order to show "balance" which creates the perception of controversy or scientific disagreement when there is none.
So it seems to me the point of the article is well made. In summary, media censorship is hard because "lies" defined in a way that would make censorship work, would fail to capture all the things that in an ideal world we would wish to it to capture. Alternatively, we lack the means to censor "lies" when it is defined more broadly (and more comfortably) as the intention to deceive.
Thank you. This is more or less my interpretation of Scott's point and that a lot of comments have gotten bogged down into "is this a lie or not?" while losing the larger point that regardless of what we call the misinformation we don't like, it is highly problematic and far from straightforward to find a way to eliminate it in a public policy way.
Norms of good journalism can be articulated and upheld, the public can get more savvy about what good journalism looks like and support it... but it's hard to see what kinds of government action would make a substantial difference here.
Not that I'm the first person to notice this, but when a newspaper has a strong ideological slant, they'll tend to take a nuanced, carefully researched article, and give it a title like "The Left Is LYING About X" or "Proof That Republicans Are WRONG About Y". They'll also often lie by omission or suggest something untrue through implication or innuendo.
So, yes, I agree that it's very hard to catch the media in an outright lie, and it's probably impossible to effectively regulate misinformation without throwing out the first amendment, and quite possibly ending up censoring perfectly true information the government doesn't like. I considered all this obvious but maybe that was overly optimistic of me.
I guess where I disagree is that there seems to be a false dichotomy here between "the media is literally telling lies" and "the media is just trying to reason under uncertainty." If someone deliberately tries to deceive me, I'm comfortable declaring them Evil and/or Dumb, even if no individual sentence can quite be technically considered a lie.
Trump was the one that lead the stolen election claims, not the media. And Trump definitely told some outright lies about it. I documented a few of them, at the time:
Trump tweeted things like, "In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!"
(None of that was true)
Or: "The Great State of Michigan, with votes being far greater than the number of people who voted, cannot certify the election. The Democrats cheated big time, and got caught. A Republican WIN!"
(Also, not true)
Or: "In certain swing states, there were more votes than people who voted, and in big numbers. Does that not really matter? Stopping Poll Watchers, voting for unsuspecting people, fake ballots and so much more. Such egregious conduct. We will win!"
(Not true in any state)
There were a lot of other less obvious lies. Trump said that dead people voted. He pointed to vote dumps as big cities reported. He claimed that Dominion is running the election. None of that really held up if you looked into it, but it's not quite as easy to demonstrate that the claims were false.
I don't have a record of everything Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell said at press conferences. I would imagine you can find blatant lies in that, especially since they walked it all back in court because they didn't want to lie under oath. And then there was some kind of show hearing in Pennsylvania where people weren't under oath and made up whatever claims they wanted.
So, none of that is "the media lying", it's just Trump and his lawyers lying. Then the media repeated some parts of it and most conservatives jumped on board in believing the election was rigged in some more or less subtle way.
I'm not sure if there's archived video to search, but I would imagine I could also find outright lies about the election on Newsmax or OANN. I recall they brought Ron Watkins (the guy who is most likely Q) on as some kind of analyst talking about Dominion machines. I would guess that segment was less than truthful.
You're trying to argue that everyone just operates on confirmation bias and no one is "DUMB AND EVIL".
In Trump's case, it's easy to see that he is either EVIL, for blatantly lying about vote counts, or DUMB, for not knowing that he's lying about these.
And you can tell it's a pattern, because he said the same things when Ted Cruz beat him in Iowa.
I think there's a way in which rationalists act like useful idiots, when it comes to these things. Like, after Trump started calling the election fraudulent, we all just started crunching numbers to try to prove it one way or another.
But his game is just to frame what's being talked about. He wants to yell "STOLEN ELECTION!" enough times that dumb people believe that it was stolen. Working through the numbers and litigating the facts just shows that it's being discussed. People too dumb to follow the arguments just see that it's a valid question whether the election was stolen or not.
The same is probably true of your second claim about vaccine deaths. Debunking most anti-vax arguments is easy. But if you get enough people debating vaccine safety, a lot of people just notice that everyone's talking about vaccine safety, and therefore many people think vaccine safety is highly questionable.
The individual claims about vaccines range everywhere from outright fabrications, to intentional misinterpretation of data, to actual safety concerns. Every anti-vaxxer has a different strategy, many of the ones with largest audiences toe the line of allowed speech by finding suspicious but real datapoints or by "just asking questions" without explicitly stating things. Steve Kirsch is most definitely a bad faith actor, not someone who accidentally misinterpreted one poll about vaccine deaths.
It's useful to ask what an information source sees its job as being. One job might be to inform me--to give me an accurate picture of the world. Another might be to give me enough background and context to put together my own accurate picture of the world, or to at least notice the shaky bits of their picture of the world. Another goal might be to entertain me. Another might be to flatter my prejudices. Another might be to convince me to do what they think I should do (vote the right way, get vaccinated, etc.). Another might be to show themselves to be on the right side of some set of issues to other people who are important to them.
I care a lot about the first two jobs, some about the third (more entertaining is better than less entertaining, all else equal) and consider the rest of those jobs as negatives--I'd rather have a news source that spends zero effort flattering my prejudices, convincing me to act as they think best, or signaling their position on the right side of history.
I am especially not interested in news sources that feel obliged to omit relevant information because it might have bad social effects--say, being unwilling to speak ill of Ukraine now that they're fighting a way against Russia.
“I don’t worry about these questions too much *because I’m not a conspiracy theorist*. It seems much more likely that the FBI does its crime reports in a weird way, or that there’s some good explanation for the lack of trauma helicopters, than that the government faked an entire school shooting for some bizarre reason.
But this is a judgment call on my part (an obviously correct judgment call, but a judgment call nevertheless). *A crazy person* could see those same facts and decide it was more likely that the government faked a school shooting than that there would be a real school shooting that no trauma helicopters came to. I don’t know why they would think that, but empirically sometimes they do.“
Asserting that you made the judgment calls you did because you were neither 1) “a conspiracy theorist” nor 2) a “crazy person”.
How would we know either is true? How many conspiracy theorists think of themselves as “conspiracy theorists”? How many crazy people self identify as “crazy people”?
At least some conspiracy theories turn out to be true in some form. I mean, "The CIA is running a network of secret prisoners where people kidnapped off the streets of random cities all over the world are taken and tortured" sounds like something you'd hear from your favorite anti-government conspiracy type, but it actually happened and ended up in the newspapers. Similarly, "9/11 was an inside job" is a common (and pretty clearly wrong) conspiracy theory, but the anthrax mailings are alleged to have come from a US bioweapons researcher who committed suicide right before he was to be charged in the attacks. (Though it has never been clear to me if this means he really was the guy, or just that after his suicide the FBI agents in charge of the case saw an easy way to close the case with no inconvenient defendant to contradict them.)
Surrounding this is a huge cloud of utterly nuts conspiracy theories, and movie-plot conspiracies that probably couldn't really work, and weird stories that go around and sometimes get signal-boosted by opportunists, or whatever. And also real conspiracies, but the real ones are probably more like some dude on the county sewer commission getting payoffs from his brother in law who owns a construction company.
I believe the number is two, but the point still stands. FBI says "this definitely wasn't a terrorist attack or conspiracy, it was one nutty bioweapons researcher. This one, right here, and we're going to run him through a living hell until he confesses". Specified bioweapons researcher proves his innocence well enough to win a lawsuit against several of his accusers. FBI says "this definitely wasn't a terrorist attack or conspiracy, it was one nutty bioweapons researcher. This one, right here, and we're going to run him through a living hell until he confesses". This time the specified bioweapons researcher fails to prove his innocence, and commits suicide. FBI says "see, we told you so".
Whatever your initial prior, the appropriate update after the first false accusation should have you *extremely* skeptical of the second basically identical accusation.
I agree that the media tends to reports facts selectively and out of context rather than outright fabricating stuff. However, I don’t see a big difference between the two. One can take almost any sufficiently complicated story and report/interpret truthfully but selectively and out of context to get the message one wishes to get. I don’t think that the additional constraint “doesn’t make stuff up” would add much in terms of influencing readers in one direction or another.
Interestingly enough, nobody mentioned the whole campaign of presenting Trump as "Russian asset" and treating every little detail in his behavior as a proof of that. Which, unlike Infowars, earned a special prosecutor and significantly influenced US politics.
My favorite in all that was a spectacular Alfabank story, where some "security researchers", some of them the same one tasked with security Trump's communications, worked with opposing campaign to concoct a narrative that Trump is secretly communicating with Russians, did use Trump's communication logs for it (which are supposed to be private but as far as I know no consequences for that egregious breach of professional ethics and privacy to anyone) and those logs showed some marketing spam from Trump org's domain going, among myriad other places, to some Alfabank-related servers (where it almost certainly was buried by spam filters, but maybe some annoyed Alfabank IT person actually read it before). Out of these, the conspiracy story was blown up and I still encountered references to it as a true story as late as end of 2021. Were any of the press outlets pushing this "lying" about the facts? They certainly published many false statements, but they could be likely attributed to opinions or quoting people that lied to them, or something like that. So, no lies here.
Or take the Biden laptop story. FBI knew it's genuine - they had it in their hands. When the New York Post story broke out, the press outlets that didn't treat it with deadly silence wrote that 9000 "intelligence sources" told them it bears "classic marks of Russian disinformation". Were they lying? Probably not - we now know that FBI/CIA/OGA/whatever other TLA led a campaign of "warning people against Russian disinformation" which strongly hinted and this particular story. But they didn't even name it directly! And certainly poor journalists couldn't know it's true when Other Government Agency tells them it's "classical marks"! And that maybe isn't a lie too - the story could be true but "look" like it's false, and if you say "it looks like it's false" while knowing it's true but not mentioning it - are you lying?
So (almost) nobody lied, and yet the truth was successfully hidden and the lie was successfully propagated. Funny how it works.
I think I figured out my confusion. Scott says, “although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context”. In doing so, he distinguishes between intentionally false facts and misleading articles containing true facts.
However, drawing on what others have said, there are more possibilities than these, and I found it helpful to think in terms of the following categories:
1. Knowingly false statements, i.e. lies. Scott is correct in my view to restrict the concept of the ‘lie’ to this category, and this accords with its traditional meaning. As a general point, it is often very difficult for a well-informed recipient to be sure that such a statement is a lie, because the recipient does not have direct access to the thoughts and beliefs of the speaker. An in-depth investigation into the speaker and their circumstances may be needed to decide that they were lying, e.g. a fraud investigation and trial.
2. Unintentional false statements, based on presented true evidence. Giving Infowars some benefit of the doubt, this seems to be what a lot of the articles cited by Scott amount to. The articles themselves contain a number of false statements (e.g. that Obama’s birth certificate is fake), as well as many true statements as ‘evidence’ (about white lines on a PDF etc), and it is plausible that the false statements are based on genuinely believed, if fanciful, inferences from the evidence. The blameworthiness of a statement in this category should depend partly on how negligent or reckless the person making it was.
3. Unintentional false statements, without presenting evidence. This is what you get if you state your false belief without presenting the evidence that led you to it, for reasons of space or otherwise. My impression is that this is the nature of a lot of what the mainstream media referred to as Trump’s ‘lies’. Trump would boldly state something false about immigration or election results in a speech or tweet; if he believed it (which I suspect he usually did) he wasn’t really lying.
4. Articles comprising entirely true statements that, due to selection and omission, together give a misleading impression. This is distinguished from the previous categories because it doesn’t involve saying anything that is explicitly false, e.g. an article that just presenting various statements along the lines of ‘Dr Expert says that Obama’s birth certificate looks suspicious’ or ‘Obama’s birth certificate shows up funny in Adobe Illustrator’ as opposed to headlining an article with a false statement that ‘Obama’s birth certificate is fake’. This is what we mean when we say that an article is misleading, even if it doesn’t contain any actual false statements.
I believe that Scott is correct that lies (category 1) are very rare in the media – both mainstream and Infowars-level ‘alternative’. 2 is more common, but moreso for something like Infowars than mainstream media. My impression is that 4 is common in mainstream media, and my initial feeling was that this might sometimes be worse than 2. Whereas the author of 2 is simply mistaken, 4 seems to imply that the author knows there is a false statement that they can’t make, and is scrupulously avoiding it, but still wants to lead the reader into believing a falsehood anyway.
I need to think more about how all this maps on to the concept of ‘misinformation’ or what it is feasible or desirable to ‘censor’.
What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis.
They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?"
I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much.
In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece.
That's not true. I mean, did you ever read it? Obviously they were not all straight reported stories, come on. To get it from the horse's mouth, look at https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/626827/weekly-world-news-bat-boy-oral-history where they discuss how in the first issues they did try to hew strictly to factual stories but then very rapidly began doing wholesale unabashed explicit fiction writing with as much offbeat news as they could find to maintain the fiction of nonfiction reporting and keep it entertaining, which is of course the same thing InfoWars or Fox or the Macedonian trolls will do (but more for evil). There was certainly not 'always had sources'; a small fraction did. Eg as the ex-WWN writers describe the early period:
> Ivone: We tiptoed into fiction. We’d exaggerate now and then, and then exaggerate more, as we went through newspapers and magazines. “This is a good story, it’s already covered, but what would make it more compelling? What would yield the most compelling headline?” That’s how we got into thinking about this imaginary world with recurring characters, like Bat Boy, Bigfoot, aliens, and all the rest.
>
> Lind: We wrote these things straight, for people who wanted to believe these things. We wrote it like a news story. We wrote a lede with a dash in it, filled it in, and then had a money quote.
>
> Ivone: It was an incremental process. We didn’t fight it. We were being rewarded by readers.
>
> Lind: We didn’t make all of it up. A lot of them were true stories.
>
> Ivone: We used “borrowed credibility.” On the left-hand side, there were stories people recognized, and then there were the more outlandish, mythical, urban legends on the right side. It was all juxtaposed with recognizable, legitimate stories to get readers to think about it. “This is true, this farmer in Idaho saying his wife ran away with Bigfoot.” It’s given a little bit of credibility, a platform to give people permission to believe it.
>
> ...Ideas weren’t solely a result of imagination. The staff of Weekly World News would hear from readers and even called up legitimate sources to help validate their fables.
>
> ...Kupperberg: The fact that we were able to sit around and make up a new world every week was an amazing thing. And they paid us for it.
Do you disagree with the Texas Court of Appeals in its decision denying Alex Jones’s Motion to Dismiss?
“The April 22 broadcast contained direct false assertions of facts implying that the parents colluded in what Appellants cast as a hoax relating to the murder of their son, as well as a whirlwind of other statements that, according to Jones, ‘all tie[] together’ and relate to the shooting at Sandy Hook.”
I would like to suggest that, in contemporary American English, "X Important Person On Our Team Says Y" means "Y Is Definitely True", the only difference being that the former includes a ceremonial formula that indicates the class and role of the institution. The "citing sources" formula is widely understood to mean, along with much other context, that the institution performing it has selected the most important facts for inclusion in the article, that they do meaningfully contribute to the article's conclusion and that the conclusion is therefore trustworthy.
That's all context that comes along with something being a news article. Nobody gets to write news articles apart from it. Most people understand the Fox article to be a truth claim about the election, not a truth claim about what specific thing Ron Paul did or didn't say. So that's what it means, and it is, in fact, a lie.
Correctly performing the ceremony of finding a source to say the lie they want to tell and citing it in official journalist language does give them official immunity from having lied. The official and the ceremonial are closely linked. But it doesn't give them any moral or reputational immunity.
Scott and the commenters agree about the moral and reputational cost these dishonest institutions should bear; it's really a disagreement about the semantics of the word "to lie".
While I agree there's a definitional disagreement about "lie", I gather Scott's larger point is criticizing simplistic thinking about how to stop misinformation in the media. I don't know who the specific simplistic thinkers are in this instance, but the critique is clear enough.
You're right. Hmmm. I'm not sure about this, but I think I disagree with Scott about whether this kind of deception is cut and dry. In the case of individuals, there's a lot of gray area, and there are a lot of cases where somebody might seem to be lying, but really they're trying their best. But big institutions like Fox or the Washington Post have fact checkers, and are expected to have fact checkers. When we read them, we're right to expect them to include relevant details. When they lie in the way we're talking about here, it could, in all practicality, be adjudicated by a fair and objective censorship board of some kind, in basically the way Scott is saying can't be done. Because the Washington Post and Fox should know better, and they do know better, and so it's not impractical to hold them to a higher standard than a tabloid or a random individual.
(I don't think a censorship board is a good idea. I just don't believe in this particular barrier to implementation in the case of big institutions.)
I was interested to hear when Musk took over Twitter and started firing people that the EU regulators in Ireland had rules about what kind of internal oversight staff Twitter needed to have relative to security in order to be allowed to operate in the EU zone. So it seems like their way of addressing this kind of thing is to have standards about staffing in a media platform. One could imagine regulators requiring a news outlet to have X number of fact checkers per total staff or something to ensure that an outlet is at least providing for the possibility of fact checking.
Okay, but people aspiring to be rational need to recognize this pattern and not buy the "the guy who said this is high status to my tribe so his words must be true" thing, right?
You are moving the goalposts in the comments, because now you are saying that making a factually false assertion doesn't count as lying being you might honestly believe it. But then what does count as lying? Any lie can simply be rebuffed by saying that the person telling honestly believed it. Even when the person themselves admits that they didn't believe it's, you say it's still possible that they weren't being honest when they admitted that they were intentionally lying.
Moreover, yes I agree the media frequently avoids "lying" by simply quoting someone else who is lying. I don't see why choosing to quote someone who you know is lying without saying that they are lying doesn't count as lying. You are conveying to people an assertion that is not true. That seems indistinguishable from lying.
Some years ago I went to an actual conspiracy theory *convention*, in the Bay Area, and it’s interesting to think about how the cases were presented, unfiltered by external media, in the light of what Scott says.
The theories did mainly rely on making very unlikely inferences from misleadingly-contextualised true facts, rather than just inventing the evidence itself (at least, as far as I could tell).
There was obviously a whole bunch of completely made-up stuff, such as Barack Obama literally being Tutankhamen… but it was on the level of overarching narrative. They presented seemingly factual evidence - such as Obama appearing in the same photograph as a pyramid-shaped thing - and then extrapolated from them to insinuate or sometimes baldly claim fantastical happenings.
At one one point there was a photo of people in Dallas (supposedly) on the morning of the JFK assassination, and the speaker pointed to a blurry man who didn’t look particularly like George W Bush, and said “Here you can see the 17-year-old George W Bush”, who he then accused of murdering JFK for some complicated reason.
The extremely unpleasant Sandy Hook conspiracy woman put up photos of the kids killed at the school alongside photos of some child actors from 1980s (or maybe 90s) adverts who looked pretty different to me, and then just stated that they were the same children.
Where there might have been a lot of false evidence was in the 9/11 lecture and the “Israelis control the weather and use this power primarily to cause storms in the Caribbean for some reason” lecture, because those lectures absolutely avalanched us with often very technical data, which I had no way of assessing and couldn’t concentrate on anyway because it was so tedious. But my guess is that they were probably also not straightforwardly false.
I'm surprised there has been so much push back on this idea Scott, and the fact that it is non-trivial to find example of outright fabrication goes to show just how much fabrication is not the main problem. It also I think points to the fact that it is tempting to demonize the 'opposition' as evil, whereas the reality is far scarier; what you believe vs disbelieve is more predicated on you upbringing and social context than any kernel or morality or intellect.
I am fairly sure that had I been adopted by Trump-voting-antivax-NRA-members parents I would hold very different views and believe very different narratives.
What's even more interesting is that it is not that falsehood is just pushed one layer down. The sources media uses to push a narrative that suits them, are also, more often than not, themselves built upon mostly-true stuff.
I've been thinking this for years, and for this reason one of my defences against falling to misinformation is to read what the text literally says, and no more. To me, as a reader, the distinction between "claim X" and "person Y makes claim X" is significant, but I've always felt in a stark minority. Of course I would much prefer it if media (and others) didn't blindly regurgitate when "person Y makes claim X", but at least when it happens, I can avoid the trap of just reading "claim X". Thanks for writing this up.
A neat explanation of why older people are less likely to changr their minds and why conspiracy theories are nigh impossible to convince: Bayesian reasoning is basically blockchain with how it's used in practice.
Start with a wrong prior, and if you update enough with the wrong kind of information, you'll start believing your chain of reasoning is longer and more established, and reject any information that doesn't build on top of your chain.
Providing an alternative explanation one link in the chain isn't enough because it doesn't invalidate all the other reasoning that has been built on top of it. You'd need a correct chain of reasoning as long as their entire incorrect chain of reasoning to be convincing enough.
That doesn't mean that conspiracy theoriests will add outright false evidence or incorrect reasoning to their chain, it still has to make sense, they just honestly don't believe in alternative interpretations because to them, their interpretation has already been justified a hundred times over.
>(if a statistics expert wants to write a really comprehensive analysis of their results, I would be interested and maybe willing to publish it)
I was thinking of taking you up on this, but the appendix for reproducing their results is missing. (https://gofile.io/d/mHC6JX) Unfortunately, I can't find a mirror of this appendix. Does anyone have a copy? The SHA256 hash is fc1d9e17fc831e288609099e290f4d0152918f6365e7a602f7bd37dbe5347546.
1. The main things Alex Jones was accused about in court were things he said on his show not articles on the website. He says more inflammatory and directly false things in the show. I think this is a general pattern, where people are less likely to directly lie in print because it's easier to get caught, and penalties are potentially higher (because it requires prenedirarion and you can't argue that you misspoke or were misunderstood).
2. On the article you give as an example, aren't they directly lying when they say he's a "school safety expert"? That's not a statement about what he calls himself, but a fact claim. Even though there's no official definition of the term the way there would be for say doctor that's still a deliberate lie.
>aren't they directly lying when they say he's a "school safety expert"?
Maybe (don't know, didn't check) but I don't think anyone is claiming that "The media never lies". If this is the biggest lie we can collectively come up with in this story, then this support Scott's point I would think.
a) it seems a pretty big deal, since a large part of journalism is presenting the views of experts to the public, since journalists aren't domain experts in everything. So falsely representing who is an expert is a major problem and an easy way of lying. It's making a claim about the credibility of the state that is false. If the identity is not relevant than there would be no difference between "school safety expert says..." and "homeless man we found in the park says..." but there clearly is.
b) the whole point of this article is about what is technically lies or not in a very strict sense. The question of how significant they are is separate
Well, Scott's post is titled "The Media Very Rarely Lies." If you need to go to an article that I think most folk would agree is many standard deviations from what would be considered "average media" and within it identify them labeling someone with a vague title "school safety expert" to, presumably, contend that Scott's claim is false (thus "The media NOT very rarely lies") it feels to me that this still firmly sits within the definition of "very rarely".
Anecdote: my mother, a retired academic, went to a conference where they had to put something on her badge. She didn't have an institution any more. She said, "Ok, put `Freelance academic` on there." And they did.
Scott's point is less about what is technically lies or not than the argument that what we point at when we say the media is lying is not as easily actionable as many people's rhetoric suggests.
He wrote below: "My point is that - as you also say - media has to choose which experts to profile. If you're an insane conspiracy theorist, you will naturally choose to profile insane conspiracy theorist experts (who you think are right), and if you're an establishment stooge, you will naturally choose to profile establishment stooge experts (who you think are right), and if a censor chooses to ban one side rather than the other, they'll be banning them not for "lying" but for having the opinions they have and following the consequences of those opinions."
People describe themselves as experts all the time. If there isn't a claimed credential involved, it's not a clear lie, right? I mean, a bunch of online misinformation experts got quoted in media and invited to testify in Congress. How would you demonstrate your expertise here? It's not like there's some kind of certification program.
As i said in the previous post most propaganda is not telling you something, not investigating something, or not allowing discussion about something. How many Americans know the war in Yemen?
Even if US papers are telling the truth, they are certainly not telling the whole truth.
A lot of the news is deciding what is and isn't news. Is an angry mob at a college somewhere shutting down an invited speaker news? Is it news when an American drone-fired missile blows up a wedding party in Afghanistan by mistake? When an illegal immigrant kills someone in a DUI wreck? When some high school kids spray paint a swastika on the front door of the school?
Depending on your desired narrative, any or none of those might be news.
At some point, the media has to decide which events deserve attention. Otherwise, the media would be obliged to report on the state of every grain of sand on the beach.
I think the author of this article is operating under a fundamentally different definition of "lying" than I am, and perhaps an entirely different meaning of what language is.
Lying is making statements with the intention to deceive. It does not matter to me that the statements are "technically true" under some particular framing of the facts. The purpose of language is to communicate beliefs from one person to another.
Consider 3 parties: Alex, Bridget and Chad. Alex publishes a series of statements on mass media intended for Chad. Alex knows and intends that this message will convince Chad that Sandy Hook was a hoax. Bridget is a "fact checker" who independently observes the communications between Alex and Chad, and is able to squint and say, well, under certain assumptions and terminology, evaluating the list of statements individually Alex is technically not stating any incorrect facts. That is entirely besides the point!
Alex made statements with the intention to deceive, and KNEW that Chad would be deceived. Chad likewise received these statements and now believes that Sandy Hook is a hoax, as was intended!
This is lying. It doesn't matter if the lying is indirect, through misinterpreting statistics, or poorly worded questions on surveys. It is lying, and could potentially even be fraud, if innocent bystanders were harmed by the lie.
And in the Sandy Hook, Alex Jones case, the law agrees with my definition. Despite all of Alex Jones' prevarication on the stand, a court found Alex Jones and Infowars liable for his deceptions:
In August, a jury awarded Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages against Jones for spreading a conspiracy theory that the shooting was a hoax.
Lying is about intention, not about whether sentences parse to true under some particular framing. Making statements with the intention to deceive, which successfully deceives it's target audience is lying, regardless if some sort of semantic dissection of those statements can't find lies in the sub components if they are chopped up into sufficiently small sub statements.
The article bothers me on two levels. The first is this where I have a broader understanding of lying where it is synonymous with intentional deception, including stating technically true things in a way that is intended to mislead an audience.
The second is even on the most narrow definition of lying, intentionally stating false facts, there's a lot of that going around too and picking up examples here and there of other kinds of disingenuous communication isn't going to going to address instances where it is hard to avoid that a straight lie is the most plausible explanation.
I strongly disagree with the argument that because detecting deception requires interpreting context the subjective nature of this endeavor makes it difficult to distinguish deception from non-deception reliably enough to justify censorship.
I however am sympathetic to a related argument that because would-be censors are prone to both errors in judgment and abuses of power, we should generally avoid censorship outside of some relatively limited contexts depending on what powers the censor is using to silence speech and what burdens this places on the people being censored to express their views.
Yes, this narrow definition no longer supports his overall point.
I think his overall point is correct. But it's not correct because there aren't some cases where Infowars says "X said Y" which are clearly asserted to support Y. It's correct because the vast majority of cases that people care about aren't so clear.
I think Scott picked an artificially narrow definition of lying to avoid having to admit that there are some clear cut cases of lying that do happen but that this narrowing actually undermined rather than supported his original case.
> It doesn't matter if the lying is indirect, through misinterpreting statistics, or poorly worded questions on surveys
It very much matters when it comes to remedies, which is Scott's point. If you are trying to divine a person's 'intention' when you are not inside their head, good luck to you. Alex Jones is perhaps an easy edge case. Fox News or the Washington Post, not so easy.
Agree. As I started reading that comment I just kept thinking “this is someone who thinks that they can determine intent with some degree of certainty.”
Fox News is often an easy case. It's interesting how political biases can make people borderline radical skeptics in the ability to discern intent when it comes to deception in a way they'd never apply to their personal lives. Of course, that people who would be censors are susceptible to that very same motivated gullibility is a reason why it is risky to hand off censorship powers to people.
I agree with the basic point that there is no clear cut line between media articles reporting what they perceive to be technically true and intentionally lying. Separating the wheat from the chaff is generally a difficult task (unless your truth is really boring). While I do subscribe to the belief in an objective reality, there is a big difference between capital-T Truth contained in math and nature (which can never be completely known to humans) and any common sense / consensus reality interpretation of neural signals received by some brain.
Suppose that you instead set out to prove that determining the perpetrators of homicides is in fact a hard task, and you start by claiming that people almost never murder other people.
Parts of the readership will probably start naming alleged murderers. Of course, for exactly none of them the claim "X is a murderer/murderess" will be a Truth, because no such claim about reality can ever be recognized as a Truth.
Mens rea (or intend) is impossible to Prove: one can never know precisely what goes on in another persons mind.
The physical act of killing is also impossible to Prove: strictly speaking, there is no pure causal relationship between a bullet leaving a gun barrel and entering a victims brain. After all, the bullet interacts with air molecules on its path in a way not precisely determined by the shooter and there is always some probability that the bullet will tunnel through the skull without interacting with the brain at all.
The unlawfulness of a killing is also impossible to Prove: even if we assume that the law is whatever the courts say it is, they may uphold different opinions at different times and a Truth can hardly be time-dependent.
Anything which was determined in any court proceedings can be quickly dismissed by pointing out that the prosecutor never Proved to your satisfaction that the court proceeding with all its findings and participants was not a figment of imagination of someone.
In the real world where courts determine lowercase-t truth, and claiming that you are innocent of murder because
a) you believed arsenic would not have adverse health effects
b) you did not tell your victim that the tea was fit for human consumption
c) you believed that the victim was immune due to them being a lizardperson
d) you believed you were assisting the victim's suicide
e) you had no reason to believe that an unknown substance in an unlabeled vial might be harmful
will not help very much (unless substantiated by some evidence pointing to another suspect).
Likewise, while nobody can Disprove the claim that Alex Jones is our fellow searcher for the Truth stumbling through the epistemic darkness of human existence, my common sense says that the court which ruled against him with regard to Sandy Hook might have been on the right track.
I'm glad Scott is continuing to beat this drum. This article, along with the previous one, feel like the kind of classic 2014-era Scott articles that ought to be a genuine mindset-shift for a lot of people. The media really doesn't lie, at least when "lie" has the simple and plain definition of "something that isn't true". If you get into the murkier stuff like "lie of omission" or "lie of misrepresentation", then maybe, but those aren't really lies in the traditional sense; they're deceptions aimed at taking advantage of common human logical failures. Using innuendo and "expert opinion" (i.e. outsourcing lies to others) to paint a skewed version of reality is something that's omnipresent in the media. And this isn't even getting into the meta level stuff like abusing the availability heuristic every time the media reports on a mass shooting or a terrorist attack to paint them as far larger issues than they actually are.
While it may be true they don't lie in a certain technical sense this sense no longer supports the original argument.
The original piece was arguing that you can't argue that policies banning misinformation aren't a problem because they'll only exclude clearly false and valueless claims. That is supposed to follow because the media doesn't literally lie so it's hard to decide if a given story is misinformation.
But it's not hard to tell when an article clearly means to quote someone to imply the underlying claim is true. No one doubts that when Infowars is quoting someone saying Sandy Hook was staged they aren't doing so merely because the fact that this random person said that is interesting in itself but to support the claim it was in fact staged.
I ultimately agree with the conclusion that it's hard to draw a bright line between misinformation and valid journalism but the fact that Infowars frames it's claims as "expert X says Y" rather than just Y doesn't really support that conclusion.
The problem comes up when you have unclear degrees of belief, eg, distinguishing between the COVID vaccine should have been tested more and it's more harmful than beneficial. Or when it really is somewhat unclear whether a source is being quoted for the truth of their claim or because it's noteable they said that (eg w/ government sources).
So I agree with the general thrust of the argument and I defended him on the last post. However, I think in an attempt to avoid admitting that the media sometimes does lie in the relevant sense he's defined lie so narrowly as to no longer support his original point.
He should have just admitted that sometimes the media does lie in the relevant sense but that it's not the usual case and that most of instances that concern ppl fall more into a grey area.
I think your articles are doing a good job in documenting how people actually do give a misleading impression using selectively chosen facts. Thanks for this!
In this case, I think it's most likely caused by confirmation bias. Journalism is not a neutral profession like it used to be: everybody has a partisan bias nowadays. This incentivizes them to view their own sides behavior very charitably while giving the least amount of charity to their opponents actions. So they THINK they're reporting the news in a fair and even-handed way but actually they are projecting their own interpretation and viewpoint onto the events.
Scott, I remember an excellent old post from you on LessWrong where you dug into Cheerios' claim that
eating their cereal would lower cholesterol, and you called it "false and misleading advertising" and summarized the FDA's position as "Don't lie about cholesterol on your cereal box, please." It seems to me that, by the standards of this post, General Mills wasn't lying, they were just reporting what an extremely misleading study said, in a yet more misleading way. Fair?
I agree. Basically, why lie when you can report a factoid. The problem is not outright fabrication, it's a failure to sanity check and/or contextualise. Readers, especially naïve readers, expect media "authorities" to be taking a neutral POV and to not be running an agenda. This is the system failure.
Sailer has said for a long time that NYT doesn't outright lie, they just amplify the messages they want amplified.
How many true facts happen each day? Journalists decide each day which one to right about. I think a lot of it is decided by what fits the recent narrative.
Black on white murder? Derbyshire talks about it. White on Black? NYT's front page jam. Black on black... not a lot of attention. Too common to even make the news.
I read the New York Times extremely closely and I trust them not to outright lie.
On the other hand, they also mislead frequently and misinform by not informing.
For example, the news section of the NYT will _never_ lie by writing "the homicide rate fell in 2020, the year of the 'George Floyd racial reckoning.'"
The NYT will however mislead by writing: "the homicide rate rose in 2020, the year of the covid pandemic" and exiling any mention of other headline events of 2020 to paragraph 17.
And the NYT will fail to inform. For example, I documented on June 8, 2021 that the black homicide death rate and the black traffic fatality rate have been closely correlated ever since the Black Lives Matter movement became a big deal at Ferguson in August 2014. Both the Ferguson Effect and, especially, the Floyd Effect have driven up both the black homicide rate and black motor vehicle fatal accident rate, likely due to less proactive policing of blacks. But the New York Times has yet to consider that news that's fit to print.
But who can blame the NYT, when Scott himself couldn't mention my finding in "What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?"
"(I’m aware of Steve Sailer’s version, but I’m specifically trying NOT to cite Steve Sailer here)"
I switched careers to punditry in part because I figured I'd contribute to human welfare: that I'd figure out a pattern and then academics and journalists would follow up on my finding. But, to my horror, I've found that I, personally, appear to have dumbed down humanity because nobody wants to risk being canceled by citing what I've discovered.
Please, just plagiarize me. It's for the good of humanity. Too many people die when my findings are ignored.
I agreed with the thrust of your original piece but I feel this response seriously undercuts it.
You've basically retreated to saying: the media doesn't say false things because they correctly cite other people who do say the false thing.
Ok, that is technically true but it also then kinda misses the whole point. Of COURSE the media doesn't claim (in it's factual reporting rather than editorials) to have first hand knowledge of most claims so they cite someone else.
Even when the first ammendment applies we don't accept that as a valid defense (on its own) to an accusation of defamation. So even in probably the most speech protective legal regime in the world we think it's possible to sufficiently distinguish good faith reporting of the news from negligent or purposeful spreading of false claims.
And that argument proves too much. I mean, it would suggest that merely putting "X says" in front of something makes it impossible to determine whether the author is implicitly endorsing what X says as credible or undermining them and that's clearly false.
--
I still fundamentally agree with the thrust of your original post which I took to be that it's a lot more complicated to distinguish misinformation from valid reporting than one might think. However, I don't think that just because someone doesn't say something in their own voice is a good argument for that claim.
Let me lay out what I took the structure of your initial argument to be and thus why I don't see this as a compelling response.
Claim being argued against: There isn't any problem with social media companies banning misinformation because it's false information with no redeeming value and no useful information/args will be affected.
Scott:
1) The media rarely engages in outright lying.
2) Therefore, any attempt to ban disinformation is going to have trouble banning only the false information.
Now that argument is relatively persuasive if one understand "outright lying" to mean publishing stories which can be clearly and easily seen to support a false claim.
However, you are now interpreting 1 to mean: doesn't make any cfalse claims directly in their own voice and only accurately quotes those who do.
But then 2 no longer follows. Yes, it's true that Infowars might always quote some 'expert' (often someone they have a disturbingly close relationship with) and cite them as the source but no one (not critics or supporters) doubts that they are putting forward that individual as credible.
I ultimately agree that the problem of distinguishing misinformation is real but the problem isn't that once the claim is made in someone else's voice it's impossible to tell whether the author is merely observing that someone said that or quoting it for the truth of what is being said.
The hard part is distinguishing degrees of belief. Ok, maybe I know an article means to question the certainty that COVID vaccines are safe and effective but how do you draw a line that allows claims saying that more rigorous safety testing was appropriate and those who imply that the vaccine is more likely to make you sick than better? Especially given the way partisanship influences how we read things.
Beyond the application to fighting misinformation, I think it's actually quite good news to confirm that media wrongdoing is almost always about wrong analysis and context around the raw facts, rather than the raw facts themselves being made up. It means we as readers have a fighting chance, by thinking hard about the raw facts themselves and by seeking more context and more analysis.
If the raw facts themselves really were routinely false, *then* we'd be in much deeper trouble!
Man there's a lot of heat in these comments. Just chiming in to say that I really liked and enjoyed these two essays and they expanded my worldview
On an unrelated note: that Bohemian Grove photo looks uncannily like the settings for Season 2 Episode 1 of *Inside Job*, a humourous animated show with the premise "what if all conspiracy theories were true" by the creator of *Gravity Falls*. Alex Hirsch really knows his conspiracy theories. Great show, highly recommended
Scott, I've been thinking about this in the context of "what form of censorship could protect the truth, given that most lies are done by boosting true facts". And I had an idea!
Headline censorship. No, wait, hear me out. It's an obvious truth that few people have it in them to read the full article and instead what we have is a bunch of deceptive headlines floating around backed by technically true articles. So focus on the part of the iceberg that's sticking out of the water, because that's the part that hits ships. Put heavy censorship on headlines and article titles and first few sentence quotes. Get very strict with that shit and force them to be ambiguous. No "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" headline, only "Here is information relating to potential weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". Headlines are what are shared on social media, so crack down on those.
This is the censorship regime that will do something useful for the cause of truth. Work to defang headlines and maybe "first few sentence previews" and force people to actually read an article to know the lies it is telling. I really do think that could help.
I propose an alternate hypothesis for why people claimed these news stories contained direct lies: Brains performing involuntary error correction.
When an input approximately matches an expected pattern, human brains "correct" it to exactly match that pattern (as described in e.g. Surfing Uncertainty).
Across many arguments about board game rules, I've encountered a lot of people who seem either unwilling or unable to understand the "rules as written" (RAW). They will continue to insist that their preferred reading of the rules is NOT a guess at the intent, NOT a house rule to improve the game, but literally and precisely what the rules actually say. Even after I've diagrammed a syntax tree for the sentence to show that the grammar is unambiguous and can't be read that way.
I don't think the hypothesis of "they desperately want to believe there's a bright line between the good guys and the dumb/evil guys" really works for explaining the board game arguments. So my hypothesis is that their brain is "helpfully" "correcting" the "erroneous" input before it reaches the level of conscious awareness.
(This could probably be overcome if they actually paid attention to the fricking syntax tree, but many people seem to trust their gut impression over any formal analysis.)
Was already sold on the first post, but I do think that at some point you have to draw a line between "honest misinterpretation" and "deliberately interpreting in the worst possible way".
A lot of the media on both sides frequently do the latter. It may not technically be a lie, but it is extremely dishonest.
It's like saying "My IQ is 140" based on some stupid online test you took, despite having taken actual IQ tests since then and getting a much lower. Or saying "my penis is 11 inches" because you manoeveured the ruler in some insane way to make it look that way.
In both cases you are purposefully misinterpretating or ignoring information to favour your desired narrative. That may not technically be lying, but it should be viewed on the same footing!
>In order to find people who were saying this when it wasn’t true, I restricted my Google search to articles from before June 1 2020.
>These articles were written before COVID had spread very far in the United States, and were right that it had (thus far) killed far fewer people than the flu that year.
This seems like a restriction you created yourself. Why would you cut off July through December, after COVID got rolling and before the vaccines came out?
Regarding what I understand as your main point, the practical aspect of "censorship": you seem to be taking as grunted that only blunt and easily falsifiable factual claims can be used to objectively distinguish "real news" and "fake news", and all other kind of deceiving stand on equal footing in the sense that their identification requires personal judgment calls.
I strongly disagree.
For example, in many cases (probably most), it's not too difficult to objectively decide whether a news-item: (A) promotes a certain claim (either directly or by-proxy, either implicitly or explicitly), (B) omits or strongly downplay some well-known trustworthy facts that change the entire story (either deliberately or by negligence, doesn't matter).
Such a news item can be comfortably labeled as "fake news". Is this a watertight scheme? Of course not, especially not when evaluated per-item. But we don't have to censor individual news-items. Instead, we may identify sources with high-rate of "fake-news" according to criteria of this sort, and silence them. This could be quite robust.
While such a system will still allow deceiving and misleading (obviously), it can be argued (and I think it's true) that it will significantly tone down the amount of harmful and overt bullshit tainting the public discourse.
Anyway, my point is not to suggest some kind of a specific mechanism to fight fake-news, but to point out that you in-fact made no effort to show that such a mechanism is impossible, just straight-out jumped to this conclusion (which I believe to be wrong).
I just want to point out that the nitpicks point you’re making doesn’t actually matter for the argument you’re having with most censors and media critics. I don’t think their definition of a “lie” is the same as yours. So when you point out that they can’t just censor “lies” (as you’ve defined them), they can respond “but that’s not the kind of lie I had in mind - I meant the kind of misinformation that requires only the most obvious, commonsense context sensitivity to label as a falsehood.”
The real argument is over how often there is such a thing as “obvious, commonsense context sensitivity” that we can trust censors to police on our behalf. It’s not easy to decide. You ban trolls here fairly often, even though their infractions are often just using words in ways that seem offputting. But you trust yourself enough to distinguish between subtleties of tone and decide who’s arguing in bad faith.
It’s fine to make the nitpicks point you’ve made, and I agree it’s true. I just think it’s mostly irrelevant to your argument about censorship at best, or a weakman/strawman at worst.
I think infowars makes a clearly false claim here " Moreover, the document contains text, numbers, and lines with suspicious white borders indicating these items were pasted from the original scan and dropped over a background image of green paper." If they claimed "The document contains text, numbers, and lines with white borders" then that would be a fact. But the claim is that *these white borders are (a) suspicious and (b) indicate that these items were pasted from the original scan and dropped over a background image of green paper.* This is false. They are not making a claim about a fact, and then saying that they are interpreting it in some way. They are making a claim that their interpretation is correct, and that is also a factual statement. It can be falsified by scanning a document on a similar machine and looking at the results: if they appear even fr a document you know is real then their claim is false.
Int he same way this statement is false "However, when the government released PDF is taken into the image editing program Adobe Illustrator, we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper, as one might surmise. " The claim is that *a number of separate elements reveal the document is not a single scan on paper*. But the separate elements are a result of, as you say Adobe grouping elements together. So they made Infowars is making a verifiable, factual claim, that is incorrect. I don't see any difference in status between the two claims *we discover a number of separate elements* which you are calling a fact and *this reveals that the document is not a single scan on paper* which you appear to be saying is not a fact. Both are falsifiable claims about the world.
FWIW, I like and agree with both articles. For the simple reason than outright easily checkable lies are less effective at misleading people than shading or misrepresenting (partial) truths.
One thing I would push back on is that the media doesn't know what it is doing. "They're honestly just failing at reasoning". For the most part, I suspect the answer is "not really". Fox knows it's misrepresenting facts and, furthermore, that doing so will generate the lie in its viewers' minds without them having to completely spell it out and actually lie.
I'm still not entirely sure as to why they are doing it. Is Murdoch a true believer? Certainly, he found it profitable to exploit older people's fears and sell ads about gold coins and adult diapers. Certainly, he's a conservatively-minded person. But I kinda be surprised if he really believed the election was stolen, the vaccine was more dangerous than COVID etc etc.
All Things Re-Considered by Peter Boghossian does a lot to refute your premise. I cannot think of any topic more than Climate Change that has been completely lied about more where political science has replaced actual science. As a 30 year Washington Post and NY Times reader, I have a hard time reading these publications now. Granted, what is not reported versus what is reported is large problem but there is an overall loss of trust in the media and claiming the media is not lying is simply BS.
Depressingly, a lot of people seem to interpret articles as one-dimensional expressions of positive or negative valence, rather than reading the claims they're actually making. So they interpreted your article as "Media good!" (even though you made a point of clarifying that wasn't what you meant) and felt obliged to reply "No, media bad!"
(I think the same happened with your "still crying wolf" article about Trump: people misread it as "Trump good!", so every time Trump did anything bad, they contacted you saying "No, see, you're wrong: Trump bad!")
Of course, it's no coincidence that the people who misread your article as saying "Media good!" interpret media articles in a similarly one-dimensional way, so will give them as examples of the media lying even when they're not.
The basic take-away on both your original claim and the pushback you received is, once again, that nobody actually reads the article but only headline or - more likely - headline "vibes".
On Iraq in particular, I recommend Robert Jervis "Why Intelligence Fails" - a summary of the post-mortem he conducted for the CIA after the Iraq debacle. He concludes, quite sensibly, that the intelligence community was actually not wrong to arrive at its conclusions based on the data available (indeed the conclusions were shared by most foreign intelligence agencies) but that it failed to adequately question the likely explanations for its conclusions and then appropriately convey the level of uncertainty (which was high) to policy makers.
Understanding the world is harder than most angry folks on the internet think.
This was a thoughtful and interesting article, full of uncomfortable facts. So of course it's getting ratio'd. For what it's worth, I have done some research like this in the past, and just like you, I kept finding sources and data that seemed incredibly unlikely to be true, but which I could not in good faith absolutely classify as a lie.
In the age of AI generated content, anyone who has access to the resources could produced enough generated information to make a false narrative appear true. Especially, when that content comes from an authority figure, who produces data the average person can't verify themselves. Then you have an army of deceived people doing the rest of the work for the propagandist.
It's is useful to draw attention to the use of factual information to lead people to false conclusions. This is the heart of disinformation, which need not itself be false to spread falsehoods. This is a major limitation of "fact checking".
Nevertheless, I do think that we're playing a bit of a semantic game. The concept of lying absolutely covers lies of omission, where you say something that is entirely true but omits a key fact. That still counts as lying if you do it in order to deceive, which is why in court you swear to tell not just the truth but the WHOLE truth.
The key for perjury, though, is intent, and so when we say "Alex Jones is lying" or "the New York Times is lying", we're making a claim about their INTENTIONS when they omit important information in their strictly factual reporting. Maybe that's unfair but when a particular person or sourc exhibits a pattern of behavior, it's both fairly reasonable and totally inevitable.
This all seems right. It is one of the reasons I've stopped paying attention to the news. As with many things it looks to me like the feedback loop is acting on the wrong variable. News is now about entertainment and getting you to come back for more. We are not consumers of news now, but the thing that is sold to advertisers. Eyeballs and clicks. I think substack may be one way to make this better. We need to pay for our news and then we can ask the news service to do it 'right'. I will observe that Elon opened the twitter files to two people on substack. Maybe that is a better future for the news?
I think judging Infowars by its text articles alone is a misstep. Articles are long, take time to write, and pass through editors, so it's no surprise that they're dutiful in hedging their sentences and bucking responsibility to patsy secondary sources. But catch Alex live on air and within ten minutes you'll hear him say he personally witnessed Joe Biden eating a baby or something.
Yes, exactly. And roughly nobody who's bought into what Infowars is selling got there from reading their text articles, LOL. The couple such people I've met spoke only (and on and on and on) of seeing Jones on TV or hearing him on the radio.
Assessing Infowars by its text articles is like assessing the NYT based on the little "clarifications" that they run at the bottom of an interior page.
Given your top examples of reporting what Rand Paul says and an obviously unreliable poll I think you're setting the bar extremely high for what constitutes lying. Remember the gag in Futurama about technically correct being the best form of correct, well the joke is that it's not best. Selecting what is published and how are as important as simple textual analysis in assessing the media. You are absolutely right that media rarely says things outright false but is that an important thing to be right about?
I think that if the conclusion (the censorship/misinformation problem) was at the top, and people read the original argument with that framing in mind, then there may not have been so much debate over the definition of “lying” used here.
My favorite example is NPR's rebunking of the Steele Dossier, particualrly the Prague Meeting.
The claim was that Trump Guy met Russian Guy in Prague.
It turned out that:
Trump Guy did NOT meet Russian Guy in Prague.
Trump Guy did NOT meet Russian Guy in any other place at any other time ever.
Trump Guy had never been to Prague.
NPR went on to say the the Prague story was "generally true." You see, other Trump-associated people HAVE met with other Russians, and some of those meetings have taken place in other European cities! So the story is generally true, just in error in some particular details.
One lens is that bias is a spectrum, rather than a binary (lying vs. not lying). All reporters are human, so all reporters have bias. Totally agreed that most of the bias comes from selective coverage (picking what to cover and what to highlight), and this bias is often unintentional. Things are further down on the bias spectrum when someone is setting aside journalistic standards to find facts that support a narrative.
I want to add my voice in support of Scott. I didn't answer to the first post, because his conclusion was obvious. At first, I was also confused why Scott would make that technical point. Only at the end of the article I understood that he was talking about censorship. I was almost appalled about how many people did not share or understood Scott's point - again, I believe it's about censorship.
Even back then he argued that the West was devolving into a purely legalistic system, including the media. He argues for moral responsibility and obligations that go beyond rights.
I think it is a very good point and the same as Scott's: The media are not legally lying, but we (should) expect more than that.
But I think "purely legalistic" means the same thing as "taking action only on objective evidence, by following a transparent and public set of rules agreed on before-hand using a uniform method which has legitimacy in the eyes of the public". That would be evolution, not devolution.
First, I would not agree with your equation. Legalistic means "to the letter of the law", which is much more in line with Scott's argument that even Infowars is *technically* not lying.
Secondly, I am not sure that your latter half of the equation is contradiction-free? "taking action only on objective evidence" which is immediately limited "by following a ... set of rules agreed on" and even further pruned by "using a method which has legitimacy in the eyes of the public" - how much truth is there necessarily left after "the eyes of the public" have agreed upon rules? Something Something Nazi Progroms.
Thirdly, would you describe the current media landscape that, in my opinion, lacks almost any sense for a more responsible, more nuanced approach to reporting as evolution?
I guess there is an argument to be made towards the rise of the likes of Substack as a response. But I am not entirely convinced yet.
The legalistic argument can not only be made about news media, it seems to affect scientific papers as well (though it might be intrinsically more robust and self-correcting?).
It is even applied more broadly in the sentiment, that "everyone"/"young people" are just claiming their rights these days, and not taking on enough responsibility. "Ask not what your country can do for you..." You know the drill.
Science is legalistic. In many disciplines, there is a codified standard of "proof" which spells out what methodology you should use, what preconditions your experiment and data must satisfy, how to perform what kind of statistical test, and what numerical result you require, to be published. If we didn't have that legalistic approach, you'd have something like literary criticism, where anybody can say anything.
The fact that the Nazis made terrible laws doesn't mean laws are bad. Legitimacy itself is no guarantee of goodness. But legitimacy is by definition meeting the cultural standards for having authority. The alternative to legitimacy is authority without legitimacy, which is (also by definition) tyranny.
"Science is legalistic. In many disciplines, there is a codified standard of "proof" which spells out what methodology you should use, what preconditions your experiment and data must satisfy, how to perform what kind of statistical test, and what numerical result you require, to be published."
Da, Comrade Lysenko. Your agricultural processes have been verified by all the finest certified experts of science! We will have a bountiful harvest this year!
Sarcasm is not an argument, and you should refrain from commenting on things you know nothing about. The statements you attempted to ridicule are not controversial. Google "95% confidence interval" for an introduction.
You continue to pretend that "arbitrary" is the same thing as "objective" and "transparent," when in fact they are nothing of the sort.
And frankly, you are the one who is showing signs of profound ignorance here. There are MANY "objective" "scientific" standards/criteria/thresholds that are completely disconnected from physical reality. Two of the best known (among my personal circle of AOAC/industrial types) are the EPA's MDL calculation which was known bogus for literally decades and Sematech's YE roadmap.
If you're going to pretend to know what you're talking about, don't toss "confidence interval," at least throw out Hubaux-Vos of something vaguely relevant.
A legal code is an objective specification of the evidence you require to take specific actions. You therefore require a legal code in order to take action on, and only on, objective evidence.
When you are not acting legalistically, you must use unwritten, non-public, non-transparent guidelines, phrased in ambiguous language, like traditional moral codes, which bottom out in "I know it when I see it!" or "Everyone knows!" claims.
There is nothing objective about a code or specification. Arbitrary, yes but that's completely different.
The exclusionary rule is part of the US legal code that is there because it was (arbitrarily) decided that some outcomes are better than others and that rule is explicitly about excluding objective evidence.
A bureaucracy is legalistic. There's nothing objective or reality-based about it.
Why should people’s evaluation of the legitimacy of Scott’s argument change because of the conclusion he came to? I can make all sorts of specious arguments for why censorship is bad; the fact that IMO it IS bad should not retroactively legitimize any argument to that effect (“raccoons are a type of fish that live in desert huts, therefore censorship is bad” should hopefully not change your opinions about raccoons).
I don't think I understand your argument. In my mind I reconstructed Scott's motivation to write the article as follows: Some people would like to censor misinformation. What is misinformation? Untrue statements are definitely misinformation. But there is also a lot of ways to only use true statements, but by leaving out context, etc still effectively misinform readers. Unfortunately, it is a matter of degree and of intent whether it is an honest mistake or a devious lie; continous degree makes it difficult to draw a line in the sand, intent is impossible to prove.
Thereby we can only safely remove misinformation when it consists of untrue statements. Everything else gets treated like anyone *accused* of criminal behavior: In dubio pro reo.
People who seem to disagree with Scott's statement seem to make a judgement call about truth without realizing it. Even further, noone is exempt from that, its a fact of life. This is why we don't want censorship, right?
I really like your much clearer and more direct reformulation of Scott’s arguments; you’ve avoided hit-button claims like “there are essentially no lies in the media”, not by a legalistic definition of “lie” but by the much less emotionally freighted “untrue”.
The one nit I’d pick with your elucidation of the argument is the implicit assumption that any attempt to control misinformation is necessarily a punishment that must take intent into account. I’m generally sympathetic to that view, but I don’t think it’s so indisputable that it should go unexamined.
I think the reason there is controversy here is that some people think you are trying to tell people how to decide whether to believe the message of an article, when you are really trying to tell people how to design a censoring procedure.
You have defined lying as “making false statements”, which is reasonable, but others have defined lying as “making statements with intent to deceive”, which is also reasonable. The distinction is not really relevant if you are reading an article and trying to decide whether or not to believe it’s message, but it’s very important if you are trying to design a censoring procedure. By your definition, you can’t censor anything because the articles don’t meet the definition of lying, and by the other definition, you can’t censor anything because the procedure for determining if it’s lies is too onerous, since you can’t determine is solely from the text of the article, nor even from omniscient knowledge about everything outside of the author’s mind.
You checked on Republican misinformation. You should also check Democrat misinformation. See if you can find a media outlet claiming that the Earth is doomed if we do nothing about climate change before 2100, or that sea level rise could flood our coastal cities by 2100, or that American police officers are more likely to shoot a black suspect than a white suspect, or that Republicans are more racist than Democrats, or that--wait, here's one: "Trump said Mexicans are rapists".
The "Trump said Mexicans are rapists" lie is, I think, a clear case where reporting can be both literally true and a lie. Trump said, of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border, "They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He literally said "They're rapists", but it's obvious that his intent was to say that /some/ illegal immigrants are rapists.
If you quoted Trump directly: 'Trump said, of illegal immigrants from Mexico, "They're rapists" ', you could at least claim to be technically telling the truth. But if you write "Trump said Mexicans are rapists", that is a lie, because by writing a summary rather than a quote, you're claiming that Trump said something equivalent to what /you/ would mean by the statement "Mexicans are rapists," rather than equivalent to what someone would mean who, like Trump, can only hold so many words in his head before he must blurt them out, relying on his listeners to supply the necessary contextual details.
A more-marginal case was in the recent Johnny Depp trial, which Depp won largely on the basis of audio recordings he'd made of his fights with Amber Heard. One exchange went something like this:
Heard: "So you say that you, a man, were abused by me, a woman?"
Depp: "Yes."
Heard: "Who do you think's going to believe you?"
Conservative media reported the entire exchange. Radical media outlets omitted the last line, changing the story from "Heard tells Depp nobody will believe his claims because he's male" to "This stupid privileged male Depp claims he was abused by a woman."
This is technically a case of "not lying, but omitting"; but it's like quoting someone who said "I am not a Marxist" as having said "I am... a Marxist". It's like quoting a comedian's joke but leaving out the punchline to make him look like an idiot. It's an omission which deliberately changes the meaning of the entire content. This isn't misleading by omission, which I think characterizes Scott's examples in the post; but deception by omission. There's no sharp boundary between the two, but there's rarely a sharp boundary between any two similar categories. I think we must still attempt to make the distinction, for as long as we're limited to unquantified human language.
TL;DR: Whether or not a statement is a lie depends not only on the syntax and semantics of a statement, but also on its pragmatics. Pragmatics IS PART OF LANGUAGE. It's lying to make a claim whose literal semantic interpretation is correct, but whose culture-specific pragmatic interpretation is false.
I’m not sure you you could evaluate whether a statement about what will happen post-2100 if hypotheticals between now and then are not done could be evaluated as a “lie” or not. Lies generally mean going against objective facts, and last I checked climate is incredibly complicated and the facts from 80 years in the future are not available yet. Wouldn’t this be like accusing someone for lying for picking the wrong Super Bowl winner today?
If you say, "I think sea level may rise 4 feet by 2100", that's not a lie; it's your own private guess. If you say, "Sea levels may rise 4 feet by 2100" or "Rising sea levels will threaten our coastal cities by 2100" in an article without citing a source, that's a lie, because you're implying there's some authoritative source which claims sea levels may rise enough by 2100 to pose an existential threat to many coastal cities.
The IPCC says sea level may rise about 1 foot by 2100. They have multiple scenarios, but no plausible scenario puts the rise much above 1 foot last I checked.
The most-common media lies in climate-change reporting are (A) to report the IPCC's worst-case scenario as its median or most-likely scenario, and (B) to call the IPCC's worst-case scenario the "business as usual" scenario, when in fact it assumes that we start dumping much more CO2 into the atmosphere today. (I think it also assumes that the atmosphere has more CO2 today than it does, but am not sure. It's a legacy scenario, included only for comparison with earlier reports in which it was still possible.)
It does seem to be a lie by the IPCC to include that scenario in the report at all, though, as it's presented as a prediction, yet it isn't plausible--but you can't tell that it isn't plausible just by reading the entire report; IIRC you have to check a cited source on the meaning of the scenarios. This is especially deceptive since the IPCC refuses to attach probabilities to scenarios. At the very least, their excuse for not doing so--"we are not trying to predict the future" IIRC (not an exact quote)--is a lie. Their only reason for being is to predict the future.
Also, please note I said nothing about what will happen post-2100.
Sure, agreed on all counts. But someone who disagrees with estimates of the future is not “lying”. Nobody is picking the Detroit Lions to win the Super Bowl, but since they have not technically been eliminated someone who did so would not be “lying” about this future event, just very likely to be wrong.
A journalist who reports their own opinion, or the opinion of their circle of friends, in a way that implies it came from an authoritative source, is lying.
When someone says "because of the white lines around the print, this birth certificate is fake" they aren't only making a claim about the lines being there, but also about this fact affecting the probability of the birth certificate being fake. They are making a claim about P(A|B) being high(er), with A = "birth certificate is fake" and B = "white lines on a scan of the birth certificate".
By the subtitle of your blog, they claim that [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B) is high. If we slightly change it to P(A) * [P(B|A/P(B)], we have two parts: the prior P(A) and the evidence P(B|A)/P(B). If your P(A) is already very high, you can have A and B to be completely uncorrelated (i.e. evidence close to 1) and your original claim is true. However, this would be the classical Motte and Bailey: the implication is clearly that the evidence makes the term true, not the prior belief, otherwise why bring up the evidence at all?
So the claim has to be that P(B|A)/P(B) is high. This is an empirical claim, though obviously not as easily testable as a simple "true/false". Still, "most fake birth certificate have white lines around print" is an empty claim, not supported by anything in the article, neither is it clear how common are the white lines in general. You might not define it as a lie, but it isn't truth either.
This all is the basic Bayesian approach which you wield very effectively in so many other articles. I'm not sure why you fail to do that here.
I worked as a print journalist for 10 years, at the Boston Globe and Seattle Times. My late wife also was a print journalist, and worked for the NY Times for a few years. Mainstream orgs like the Times and Globe work very hard to expose the truth, that is their stock in trade, and without that they are nothing. Journalists as group are extremely focused on telling truth to power, and exposing corruption and systems in our culture that are broken.
The evidence of the media of the mainstream, in any form, being a place of real journalism, is very misleading....VERY....The amount of BS and hype over the vax and PLAN-Demic alone when compared to the MASSIVE numbers of dead and injured from the SAFE inoculations (that destroy people's immune system) is DEAD CLEAR evidence that the mainstream media outlets are nothing but mouth pieces for the global elite that own them....The amount of good science now available, not to mention expert testimonials of scores of the best doctors and scientists in the world that goes completely counter-current to what the media has been blabbing all along is MASSIVE.
To believe that mainstream media in any form is authentic journalism suggests the Per Aeternus archetype strongly at play in my opinion.... For those not familiar with the Per Aeternus archetype, it is probably a very good time to watch this video while thinking about what is going on in the world right now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A7GTGSfrIU
The problem with labeling half-truths as "conspiracy theories" is that often the purveyors are trying to present the information legacy media has been left out of a story because it doesn't match the reporter's (or their editor's) politics. I used to be a reporter at the local level. Loved the job, didn't make a lot of money. I quit when we got a new editor who heavily edited several of my articles because I included the opinions (possibly facts) of local residents who challenged the official account of some news items. He said they were wrong and I should stop reporting in a balanced fashion (not his words, but the intent of his words was clear). Being a small town, there was no competition and being pre-internet, I had no way of setting up an alternate source, so I found another job, not in the media field. We still get unbalanced news, but at least I'm not a part of it.
So, you're right. Media doesn't outright lie, but they leave out or emphasize only the parts they agree with, which amounts to their consumers being ignorant of the full facts, which is more or less the state we find ourselves in after we've been lied to.
I generally agree with your thesis here. I did want to present a possible counterexample that came to mind for me when reflecting on the ACX survey, though.
The way I remember it, sometime back in the before-times, then-President Trump made some statement about how NASA moon missions were only a part of a broader strategy to get to Mars. The entire media went nuts with excitement, seemingly certain that Trump had actually made the ridiculous claim that the Moon and Mars were physically connected or something, and went to great lengths to "debunk" that claim.
In that particular example, the author is indeed mostly reporting from a real Tweet that the real @realDonaldTrump really made in reality. But their lede doesn't quote it accurately, incorrectly summarizing it as "Trump announced that the moon is a part of Mars" without much context or summarization, but you could charitably call that a misunderstanding on the part of the author. Similarly, the headline ("...claims the moon is 'a part' of Mars") is awfully inaccurate, but maaaaybe a legitimate misunderstanding in the author's mind?
But the fact that the subheadline (correctly) explains that Trump said NASA should focus on the Moon as opposed to Mars, and a later paragraph near the end of the article does eventually speculate that "[t]there is a possibility Trump’s tweet was a comment on Nasa’s [sic] broader plan to eventually travel to Mars from the moon," which sure suggests to me that the author understood perfectly well what Trump was actually saying, and deliberately chose to misrepresent it in order to make Trump look extra dumb. (And what's the point of that, really? Does Donald Trump really need any help in looking dumb??)
I suppose you could defend it as being an obvious joke directed at readers who also understand perfectly well what Trump was actually saying instead of literal reporting, but I don't now. It sure looks like awfully un-truthy reporting to me, and in a way that goes a bit beyond selectively reporting true facts.
I notice you have cherry-picked examples to support a one-sided argument; I no longer have any faith in you to be fair and non-partisan. I mean never mind about claims about the 2020 U.S. presidential election being stolen, what about claims that the 2016 U.S. presidential election being stolen? Shouldn't you discuss both claims equally?
Additionally; I myself have been, over the past few decades in my own country, been present at political speeches and rallies in my own country and observed most of the news media provide nothing but lies instead any actual news reporting. That's why when a conservative politician, or any off-narrative politician, makes a speech in recent years; there usually no transcript provided in newspapers and the broadcast media will usually show 15 seconds of the speech and 15 minutes of analysis by "experts". That's assuming that such a speech is mentioned at all!
One of the best aspects of this blog is that it almost always manages to be specific and precise without being pedantic, but unfortunately this line of reasoning is incredibly pedantic. And I'm confused why you're expending so much effort dying on this silly hill?
Yes, we get that it's technically not a "lie" if an article correctly reports that someone else has said some obviously wrong thing. But that's like saying that Madoff is technically not a thief because ponzis are schemes/frauds which is different than outright thievery. This narrows the definition of "lying" to such specific criteria that almost any entity could get away with "not lying" if they were just careful enough to attribute the assertions to someone else.
If Trump repeating "some people are saying [thing he obviously totally made up, but someone in the world has probably said at some point]" unequivocally fails your test for lying, then your criteria for lying kind of blows.
Scott's standard of "lie" here appears to mean "a person such as Scott can quickly figure out *that anyone else can figure out* the report was made up out of thin air".
I think two understated sources of controversy are:
-The standard meaning of "lie" does not require easy falsifiability.
-If content is falsifiable via the common sense of someone that's 98th percentile in gullibility and political bias, that content is unlikely to spread in the first place. Content moderation debates generally refer to content that gets engagement, requiring that at least some of the population is unable or unwilling to notice errors.
If the assertion is that no media org- even InfoWars- frequently makes lies that require digging or mind-reading to disprove, I think Scott has failed to prove this.
If the assertion is that no media org- even InfoWars- frequently makes lies that nobody could believe, then this is a much narrower claim and the title of the essays are misleading.
Perhaps it comes down to a difference in what you view as "lying." For me, reporting facts and editorializing on them in a way that *you know to be false* is lying. I don't care that the facts being used are true, I just care that the writer *knows* they aren't being honest because they have an agenda to accomplish.
Don't get me wrong; I still don't want anyone censoring "misinformation." Because, at the end of the day, how do you judge a journalist's motivation or beliefs?
But I'm very contemptuous of the media because they're wrong forever-always on the things I possess expertise on, and I can tell a sizeable proportion of that wrong-ness is a genuine, on-purpose effort to mislead (maybe for seemingly benign or benevolent reasons, but misleading all the same).
Someone brought up a fast food analogy that I like. Consider the question: "Has a person eating a cheeseburger made a knowing and intentional choice to eat unhealthily?". Yes? Obviously?
Not at all. If you go up to a person eating a cheeseburger and ask them if they are eating something unhealthy they will successfully inform you that this is true. But how many people in deciding to eat a cheeseburger are operating on the thought process: "I wish to eat something unhealthy which is why I will now eat a cheeseburger." Nobody's doing that. They aren't thinking about whether it's healthy. You can't go up to them and press the "Eat Healthy Things" button and have them stop eating cheeseburgers because they have disconnected the circuitry that involves health in their eating choices
So ask yourself: "Is there something akin to eating a cheeseburger that the media can engage in which involves them not primarily reporting things that are accurate and with proper context?" Yes. Obviously. Read Julia Galef's book "The Scout Mindset". This is a book dedicated to encouraging the rare ability to flexibly suspend your preferred beliefs in the pursuit of accuracy. She makes a particularly big deal about the one single global warming skeptic who has publicly changed his mind. Do you believe 99.99% of climate skeptics are intentionally lying and one guy decided to tell the truth?
This is a really important point. If you think the problem with media is people knowingly telling lies and it isn't what's actually happening you will fail to fix the real problem and quite possibly make it worse by creating coercive channels for people to advance their preferred beliefs in good conscience that what they are actually doing is banning misinformation. That button called "Prevent People From Telling Lies" could be taped over the accurate label underneath "Prevent People From Saying Things My Priors Have Determined To Be Categorically Untrue". Who will be more motivated to enact censorship than those who have a motivated and inflexible model telling them that there is an easily determinable set of things which are true?
For those in the "the given examples of not lying are clearly lies given context or a slightly broader definition" camp I would like some opinions on the following information and an answer as to whether knowing this leads you to believe the media are lying about the subject
In this explainer on the social cost of carbon on Carbon Brief - https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-social-cost-carbon/ - there is a section on the long considered state of the art Integrated Assessment Models (What are PAGE, DICE, FUND, and how do they differ?). The estimated cost to world GDP of warming in 2100 ranges from 4% at high temperatures to as low as a (disputed) small net benefit at a low temperature rise. This low single digit projection can be further contextualized by the median projection of overall GDP growth by 2100 of about 300%. There is no scenario in the IPCC in which welfare in 2100 is less than today. There are also few instances of weather disasters that the IPCC identifies as having a clearly statistically detectable global warming effect. For example hurricanes and typhoons are projected by some to become fewer in number (higher warming in the Arctic reduces the temperature differential that spawns hurricanes) while the number of Category 4 and 5 may stay the same or slightly increase as higher temperatures give them more energy. The bottom line is that there is very much no broad scientific evidence* of anything that would accurately be called catastrophic in the effect of warming in 2100 much less today
Ok. So what do the media headlines say? They say unquestionable evidence of more severe weather caused by warming is happening all around us now that obviously proves that things will be catastrophic in 2100. Are these knowing lies? If the media should know good and well exactly when they are lying would they be doing so in virtually global unison on the biggest story of the century?
*Key phrase of broad scientific evidence. While I am interested in claims that there is scientific evidence of current or future large net costs of warming on the side I do think it is nearly certain that the general evidence that should be accessible to someone who carefully and skillfully intends to tell the truth would not enable them to say that we are currently experiencing or likely to experience in the future a general climate disaster
It feels like most of your responses are of the form, "you said this article says 'X', but actually it says some person said 'X' and then doesn't question that person"
Except I'm pretty sure all news articles consist mostly of reporting peoples' claims so can we say that it still counts as lying if an article quotes someone being wrong and doesn't evaluate the truthfulness of that person's statement? That seems like a bright line category about as easy to identify as making a direct false statement. Yes, there are still other gray areas, but this seems to cover about 80% of them.
I refer you to the IPCC web site which provides the material you want in enormous detail. Of course you could use the last couple of years news to arrive at the same conclusion.
To add to your point about censorship, it's worth noting that there actually is a genre of media where lying is illegal: advertising. The laws against false advertising do help eliminate the egregious snake-oil cons, but they don't change advertising's basic personality, which shows you just how much tone, framing, etc. go into persuasion rather than falsifiable facts per se. Statements like "this shampoo will make your hair look great" aren't falsifiable because what looks great is a subjective matter, even if there's a broad social consensus about what good hair looks like, so there's no real way to police such statements.
Journalism is different from advertising of course, but the problem it's always dealing with is that it has basically the same financial incentives as advertising, unless it's a non-profit outfit. As a former journalist, I agree with much of what you say about how these things can happen, but I do feel that the general discussion here is overestimating the role of ideology and underestimating the role of business interests. A lot of readers' view of the way it works seems to be "the media in their imperial tower decide what we should hear," but a lot of media people experience it as "the readers are telling us what they want to hear with their clicks, and we'd better give it to them or we'll be out of business." Which doesn't lead to deception per se, but it can distort news judgment, which as you accurately say is a big factor in how true facts can turn into the wrong sort of stories.
Hmm....I get the theory here, but: if that was a big factor then wouldn't we expect nonprofit news orgs to be better, along the dimensions being discussed, than are for-profit ones?
That is very much not my observation or experience. [Which is not at all based on any prejudice against professionalized nonprofits -- I am actually a career manager of such and gladly so.]
E.g. I banned NPR (nonprofit) from my daily life around the same time as I did the NYT and WSJ (forprofit); they'd all become just too disappointing in the same manner. ProPublica (nonprofit) is indistinguishable, both for good and for ill, from the large established (forprofit) entities that it was founded as an alternative to. For my money the best mainstream English-language news source nowadays is the Economist which is for-profit; the Guardian meanwhile which is effectively a nonprofit has at best the rigor of today's NYT. Etc.
Granted that the bottom end of modern news media (InfoWars and etc) is a cynical cesspool made up entirely of for-profits. But outside of the gutter, it does not appear that the legal/financial basis of organization is a fundamental distinguishing factor in the caliber of the output.
Non-profit news organizations are free from the incentives that motivate for-profit news, but they have incentives of their own. Or, to be more precise, the people who exercise editorial control over non-profit news orgs are the people who have some interest or motivation in doing so.
Most (by word count) of the ‘news’ these days is actually opinion or what used to be called ‘news analysis.’ Misrepresentation of facts in an opinion piece isn’t usually considered lying. It does erode confidence in the credibility of the news media.
Late to the party, but I'd argue that there are regular pairings of anecdote with statistic that involve blatant enough equivocation on a term so as to count as "lies".
One common example is a story about the accidental death of a small child playing with a handgun (or a sibling doing so), paired with a statistic on "children killed by firearms annually", where that statistic goes up to age 18 or 19 and overwhelmingly represents teenagers committing suicide and teenaged gang members murdering each other.
To me, that's about as close to the concept of "lie" as if a story on some people dying from E. coli-tainted meat was paired with a statistic on "deaths from meat" that included the estimated increase in heart disease and cancer deaths among meat eaters versus vegans.
The latter example seems absurd -- and would probably be called a lie -- only because it's basically never done, whereas the former is the norm.
I think the main argument that "journalists lie" is more something like:
>But if wrong people (even the most wrong people) are just trying to reason under uncertainty and evaluate the relative strength of different sources of evidence - well, that’s the same thing we’re doing!
is a nice thought. It is something understandable if you just view journalists as barely better than PR flacks or random office workers of many stripes.
But the "news" generally, and prestige news in particular, and many of the people practicing it really adopt and relish the regalia and imprimatur of being a special priestly caste who is predominantly focused on the truth and skepticism and getting to the facts.
When you figure out that half of them are not even doing a piss poor job of this, it makes the half-truths and misleading statements and omitted context, basically tantamount to a lie.
If I sell myself as a climate scientists, and make sure to always speak in December in the northern hemisphere and always comment that the "Well actually the weather is cooling based on the best data", I am definitely "lying" by any reasonable understanding of the term, even if strictly speaking what I said was true.
That's the version I read. So long ago. I had very little of the Polish meme in mind when I read it, believing that the setting was simply a detail. No sense of having to fight off something pejorative in the story. That they misinterpreted what decapitated meant or it was simple clerical error. When it's only 4% that hardly seems like a "here's what these people are like" racist thing. But perhaps that version was motivated by the history of "Polish jokes". Hadn't occurred to me at the time though.
That survey being in Polish might actually explain it a bit, because the obvious way to say decapitated ("ścięty") is sometimes (maybe only in some regions?) used in everyday speech to mean "had their hair cut".
Sure. I considered that 4% of the people didn't know what the word meant as much a possibility as just marking the wrong box. Now if the response could be broken out by region we might have a clue. Also keep taking polls until one is weird and that makes it worth reporting. Of the poll were one of those that had to be answered for access to something then I personally would be inclined to answer yes. I might anyway.
I think Scott's right on his narrow technical point, but I still think there is an effective distinction to be drawn between the broader sense of "lies" and real news. That is: in the production of bad news (infowars style, or fox news style), there is in fact someone in the chain of news production who acts with the intention of deceiving or misleading. I think that person is often very well hidden, as in the Infowars/Sandy Hook case, but they do in fact exist.
I think this because there aren't that many useful idiots in the world. There are plenty of idiots, but because they're idiots, they're not very useful. It is, I suggest, impossible to create a functioning news organisation entirely out of people dumb enough to truly believe that vaccines cause autism/covid vaccines kill/Hunter Biden is a major scandal/whatever. They can't keep the computers and the finances working.
In fact, as the Sandy Hook and Iraq WMD stories show, when a false story is massively propagated, there is a genuine bad actor in there, lying for their own twisted purposes. Among these liars, I would not include the NYT editorial stance on tech, because it was a stance, not a commitment to a factual falsehood.
Now, these bad actors are often very difficult to find, and so the fact that they exist may not help us very much in trying to determine what is and is not fake news. But my base assumption is that the bad actors are much more common than Scott seems to be assuming. That is, e.g. when a news organisation decides "the hill they wanted to die on is "lockdowns are evil and COVID doesn't matter"," they either do so in the explicit knowledge that they are wrong; or if the editors/decision-makers do in fact passionately believe such a thing, they subsequently force their paid journalists to create stories that they (the journalists) know are misleading. Somewhere in the chain of news production, there is deliberate misleading.
There is little practical difference between saying "2+2=5" and saying "some guy online said 2+2=5, is it true? We report you decide."
It is on this distinction that Scott bases his argument, and he ends up being technically true, but not in an obviously valuable way.
In terms of limitations on free speech, what is the difference between shouting "fire" and shouting "some guy online said there was fire!" If both have the same effect of initiating a stampede, and both are prosecuted accordingly, does the second style of statement categorically differ from a lie all that much?
If you keep using a source that has been shown to fabricate things constantly, would that not be intentional deceit? At *some* point the journalist must be considered complicit in the lie
I think the question of intent is interesting. Does the media present out of context etc. knowingly, to convince the readers of something they know is false, or are they making an honest (maybe motivated reasoning) mistake?
Absolutely the former, absolutely, no question. 100%. Not all the time, but for anything with any real political consequences, 99/100 times its the former.
It's a while ago and I don't remember the details, but wasn't there an actually existing person who claimed to be the victim of the events described?
So that would actually be another example of Scott's thesis: the "journalist" who wrote the story, did not just make up the whole thing from whole cloth. Rather, they sought and found a mentally disturbed person who could be coaxed into telling them the story they wanted to hear, and then they reported that story while very carefully and deliberately not asking any critical questions which would have caused it to fall apart before publication.
Undoubtedly, if that same journalist had been told a story which they *did not* want to hear (for example, with a white guy from a wealthy family as the victim and a bunch of lower-class minorities as the perpetrators) they would suddenly have turned into Sherlock Holmes, able to pick out the smallest discrepancies in the accuser's story. Or they would have simply ignored it. But still, for the story that actually did get printed, they cared enough about plausible deniability to make sure that there was an actual source they could point at.
I worry that in at least some of these cases you may be using a formalistic (and perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of "lying" that renders it nearly useless (and, as shown by the defamation verdicts in the Alex Jones case, is not how the law works--given that truth is an absolute defense to defamation).
It seems that under your definition, if a media source quotes person X as saying completely false thing Y, and person X in fact did say Y, then that is not "lying." But take this to its conclusion. Suppose Alex Jones wants to say completely false thing Y, without violating your definition of lying. All he has to do is find one (1) person unethical/misinformed/deranged person X, somewhere on the planet, who is willing to say Y, and then he can just say "According to X, Y" and Alex Jones is not "lying." In fact, Alex Jones could *recruit* person X, and instruct him, "Please make a statement where you say Y, which you and I both know is completely false" and then X says Y and now Alex Jones can say "X said Y" and Alex Jones is not "lying."
To me that suggests that this definition of "lying" is so denuded of its ordinary meaning as to depart substantially from English usage. Fortunately, the jury instructions were broader.
>>In any case, it definitely doesn’t look like anyone is making anything up or outright lying. Fox is honestly reporting what Rand Paul said. Rand Paul is honestly reporting what the Vote Pattern Analysis blog said. Vote Pattern Analysis discovered a suspicious-looking true fact, and leapt from there to “fraud!” without considering innocent explanations. <<
Great analysis as always. For many years I always thought that the difference between conservative media (say, Wall Street Journal) and liberal media (New York Times) is the choice the editors make in what stories to cover, where to place them etc -- with the unavoidable misleading conclusions they lead readers to. That "misleading" I do think is on purpose though -- the media knows their audience and deliberately picks the facts they use so that their readers reach strong opinions, share the articles on Social Media etc. It is not like the Washington Post is hurrying to publish stories about Hunter's laptop in the front page, or Infowars (IMO, a garbage outlet I don't touch) rushes to publish negative stories about Trump.
Here is is somewhat tangential and relatively irrelevant question, but why weren't you able to fully read the bloomberg article? I don't have a bloomberg news subscription and could read the whole thing. Let me guess: bloomberg has one of those "10 free articles a month"-like thingies and you had exhausted your quota by the time you tried to accessed the article?
I still think this is a stretch, because literally anyone who tells a lie, no matter how blatant, will come up with a justification for it after the fact. Like, that's just how arguments work - you make a claim and you support it with other claims. Any liar who says more than one sentence is going to end up mentioning a factual statement *somewhere.*
Like, suppose I say "The moon is made of cheese. Look at the moon - don't those pockmarks in its surface look like the holes in Swiss cheese?" By your standards, I am not lying - I've presented a true statement about what the craters on the moon look like, and encouraged people to interpret that fact towards a false conclusion.
But any definition of "lie" that doesn't even cover "a person says that the moon is made of cheese" is a pretty useless definition of lie. Like, congratulations, you've discovered radical skepticism. Now can we move on to something useful?
> But any definition of "lie" that doesn't even cover "a person says that the moon is made of cheese" is a pretty useless definition of lie.
Any definition of "lie" which *does* cover that case, *assuming that the person actually believes their own claim* and is truthfully reporting their reason for believing it, does not match how people normally use the word. In normal usage, a lie is an intentional attempt to convince somebody else of something which you yourself know to be false.
Except that it's impossible to know whether a person believes their own claim or not, unless they outright say "I was lying when I said the moon is made of green cheese." (And even then, they might be lying about that). Normal people are willing to call other people liars even though they don't the ability to read their mind and know whether they truly believe the lie or not.
There's no way to externally distinguish "this person is ignoring contrary evidence because they're trying to support a conclusion they know is false" and "this person is ignoring contrary evidence because they believe it's the product of an evil conspiracy." This is why the standard for, say, libel, is "they made their statement with reckless disregard for the truth" and not "they knew, deep down, that what they were saying was false."
A judge cannot read Alex Jones's mind to know how much of his Sandy Hook story he truly believes and how much he made up to sell supplements to gullible people, but they can look at the information that Jones had available and conclude that a normal person in his shoes would have known that his claims were very likely to be wrong.
On one hand, I think that you're absolutely correct. On the other, I find it very frustrating that they're using the cheap tactit of "this isn't me that said that, I'm just quoting someone". I know those are unrelated issues, but it feels just so cheap, even more so coming from the media that then tells things like "democracy dies in darkness" and have a very high opinion of themselves and their job.
Thanks a lot for keeping a cool head through this, going down to their level isn't going to solve anything I feel.
It's true that media sources very rarely lie sensu stricto, fabricating events out of whole cloth, but I think you're too generous in attributing good faith to everyone involved.
>They say the shooting was investigated by Connecticut state police instead of Sandy Hook local police, and since the FBI crime statistics are based on local police reports, it didn’t include the shooting.
If that is true, then it means that FBI crime statistics don't account for crime investigated by state police. Which begs the question: who is compiling extensive statistics of crime in the US?
While I can appreciate the time you put into this, you are "misleading" with your evaluation. Main media is simply that. An entertainment and indoctrination medium. The only real news can't be had from a corporate entity.
Reporting and journalism is just the opposite. Our only prayer of actually hearing some truth is through citizen journalism.
Sorry I completely disagree, the corporate media are governed by powerful people with an agenda and it shows to anyone that thinks critically. How much have they got wrong in the last 3 years alone. And everything they have either ignored or smeared has turned out to be true. Many of us saw this at the time, many others are finding out now, after the fact
I was a 60s radical, skeptical as an intellectual and social approach, but still trusting. Started working at a state psychiatric hospital (mostly socialist staff with wild exceptions) and became a Jesus Freak (mostly apolitical cultural conservatives with wild exceptions) about the same time. Rational-seeming decent people who raise families, own businesses, treat psychotics and BPD's, and very pleasantly interact with the world believe an enormous amount of crazy shit and are happy to share it with you.
There is a very easy explanation why there are suspicious looking parts in the official scanned version of the certificate. In the timeframe when old documents were digitized, Xerox had a experinmental new scan algorithm as the standard config of their scanners. This was found because of a very bad bug in this algorithm.
This is a phenomenon observed by Jacques Ellul in "Propaganda", where propaganda systems give you real facts but use narrative frameworks to determine how you respond to them. But I think this argument w/r/t censorship is a bit too clever - e.g. in the Infowars example, Alex Jones uses one piece of real evidence to make a bunch of false factual claims about e.g. "crisis actors." That is, in fact, a made-up fact.
Re: the title of the post- Sorrow is an emotion, and I don't imagine I would feel sorry about being right about something. I'm not criticizing the title, I'm actually grateful for the realization of why this colloquialism has always bothered me. If I may over analyze it: person A saying 'sorry I'm right' assumes person B feels sad about the implication that person A is right and person B is wrong. Person A is saying 'sorry' to either empathize or gloat, but if person B is a good rationalist with scout mindset, they actually don't feel sad about updating from a wrong belief to a right belief.
Whether the media lies outright or not is partly a distinction without a difference - the content is still untrustworthy and you'll either tune it out or agree with it depending on your priors. Sure, I'm guessing they're not outright lying, but then I suspect that creatively and systematically misinterpreting facts and using selected quotes from pre approved sources may fall within the common english concept of lying even if you could nitpick to insist that it doesn't.
This all makes me think of the famous Spycatcher trial, where the future Australian Prime Minister Turnbull questioned a British civil servant who had, by omitting key facts, given a false impression of what actually occurred. Turnbull suggested that he had in fact lied, while the diplomat insisted that technically speaking, by not saying an outright falsehood he hadn't lied per se. The civil servant suggested that he had perhaps been 'economical with the truth'. (The wiki page has a great and short transcript of that exchange.) I'm inclined to agree with the broader term: that a series of true facts represented dishonestly constitutes a lie. For the record, the audience at the trial at the time appeared to roughly agree with that definition too.
I think there's a fairly obvious example of the media lying about the 2020 election. The repeatedly say "no evidence", "baseless", and the like. There is plenty of evidence that exists. You even demonstrated some of it with the graph. Regardless of an explanation provided later, that's suspicious.
Evidence is not Proof. The evidence provided is not sufficient to prove the election was stolen. For the most part, people have declined to go look or when audits got forced, stonewalled as best they could. Statistical evidence in particular can never prove any given vote was fraudulent, and can only suggest that something odd was going on.
If they limited themselves to "unproven", then they wouldn't be lying. Instead, they constantly act as if there is no reason to even go looking.
"is the Objective Truth until proven wrong later by science."
That's not how "objective truth" or "science" work.
Nope.
An objective truth does not evolve. Beliefs do. No matter how much one can believe in "science," meditation will not cure a H. pylori infection. It doesn't matter how many experts tell you it will.
Sigh.
I actually did guess, 20 to 25 years ago, that the 1st Amendment's free-speech guarantee _might_ become passe on the American progressive left. It was a question that I wondered and worried about fairly often during that period, though mostly quietly to myself because nobody else I lived or worked with thought it was anything but a ridiculous thought. I now would like to go back to only wondering and worrying about it.
They misheard the question? Jesus. That’s pretty desperate & borderline offensive to the intellects of your readers.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ for more on why I might think this, though I agree 8% is higher than 4%.
So, is it just impossible that of that the vast majority of those who report a COVID vaccine fatality in their household just straight up lied to the pollster? Because that was my initial interpretation of the result.
Seems less likely than the other possibilities, most polls, even on highly politically charged topics, don't have that many liars. I'm hoping to put a similar question in the ACX survey and see what happens (eg whether dumber / less informed people are less likely to say yes, or whether die-hard anti-lockdown Republicans are more likely to say yes, or what)
I wonder if there is motivated reasoning about causes of death? That is, some people might assume that a death was due to the vaccine because it came some time after the deceased was vaccinated, even though no medical professional believes it and something else is on the death certificate.
I also wonder what the base rate is: how many people would we expect to be in the same household as someone who died, of any cause? And how much higher was that number during the pandemic?
(This is a reminder that surveys are a cursed instrument, because nobody can ask people what they meant when they answered a certain way. So we are reduced to speculating.)
Your refreshing and timely reminder that surveys are a very imperfect method of data collection is appreciated.
So many people seem to attribute god-like powers of accuracy and insight to survey results, when both the data collection and data interpretation are subject to spectacular levels of inaccuracy, even assuming everyone involved is acting in good faith.
Source: have been involved in the industry.
I mean, Nate Silver seems to do pretty well based on them.
I agree. I think a more likely explanation is that many people are choosing to attribute deaths to the vaccine that are not actually from the vaccine. For example, let's say Person A gets vaccinated and dies shortly after of some completely unrelated cause. And let's say Person B, the loved one being polled, has priors about vaccines or the medical establishment or whatever that cause them to be convinced it was actually the vaccine that killed Person A.
In hypothetical reality, Person A lived a rather unhealthy lifestyle, had lots of risk factors for a heart attack, and would have died from a heart attack, regardless of whether they'd gotten the vaccine. Then, when Person A does, indeed, die of a heart attack, and by sheer coincidence had recently gotten vaccinated, Person B blames the COVID vaccine when polled, but it wasn't really the vaccine that killed their loved one. It might be easier to believe that outside forces (like a vaccine) harmed the person than to believe that the loved one's own actions did (like a poor lifestyle, not taking their meds, etc.).
That's only one example, but I think the underlying dynamic could easily explain the poll results.
> And let's say Person B, the loved one being polled, has priors about vaccines or the medical establishment or whatever that cause them to be convinced it was actually the vaccine that killed Person A.
Are those priors common enough to account for this? (I really have no intuition about how common they are.) Like, millions of Americans think it's likely that their deceased loved ones died of a vaccine, because they think vaccines are dangerous enough that that's pretty plausible?
This was my immediate thought too! I'm surprised Scott didn't consider it.
That doesn't explain the enormous number. One in six Americans have a relative that died just then? Even if every death for a full year was blamed on it, that still seems too high.
That doesn't explain the enormous number. One in six Americans have a relative that died just then? Even if every death for a full year was blamed on it, that still seems too high.
> 3.5% of people polled say that someone in their household died of COVID, but 7.9% said someone in their family died from getting the COVID vaccine.
First, I note that this seems to be comparing two different things. My uncle (who died of/with Covid) is in my family (former legal guardian!) but not in my household.
Second, I agree. While it's not a direct example of this phenomenon, I want to discuss my uncle's case. One morning he was at least mildly ill and had incontinence. But he went out gardening, and collapsed. Passers-by saw it and called 911; the ambulance took him away just as his wife realized what was happening. He was unvaccinated and at the hospital he tested positive for Covid, after which his wife was not allowed to visit. Later he was placed on a ventilator and had a brain scan, which showed evidence of a stroke (I wasn't told the order or timing of these two events).
Then he died, and the doctors blamed Covid. His conservative anti-Covid-vax wife seemed uncertain whether Covid or the stroke killed him, and his rabidly conservative anti-Covid-vax brother (my father) blamed the stroke, and the doctors who preferred to treat the Covid instead. I suggested to my aunt to fill out a form to get clarifying information, but she repeatedly declined. Fun fact, my father also told me I was wrong when I said that the CDC said that people in his age group had a 7% chance of dying of Covid (I asked why he didn't claim the CDC was wrong instead of me, but he refuses to answer any/all of my questions about Covid/vaccines.)
People see what they want to see.
Edit: though I feel like a bigger part of the explanation comes from another comment by Zack:
> Of these 36 respondents, 20 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from the vaccine and "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" I'm skeptical that 55% of people who had a household member die of a vaccine would plan to get the vaccine themselves.
> [...] there seems to be a broader issue with the survey design. [...] 40 people completed the survey in 17 seconds or less. I'm skeptical it's possible for someone to provide a quality response to the survey that quickly. 225 people (nearly half) completed the survey in less than 31 seconds. I think that's the fastest I could answer if I were seeing the questions for the first time.
I heard a lot of stories early in the pandemic about people becoming irate that their loved one’s cause of death was listed as COVID and not a preexisting or underlying condition. I didn’t really understand this sentiment, but it demonstrates how “cause of death” is not as clear cut as we might like and could be a data point where hospital records or surveys might differ without either being genuinely false.
I have an uncle who got really sick in a really weird way immediately (within a few days) after getting vaccinated. This was news in the family because he had been skeptical of the vaccine but was eventually convinced it was safe and he should take it.
I would have had a tough time answering the question on the survey if he had died (thankfully he didn't!), because there's obvious reason to look at the vaccine, but it would be conjecture that wasn't based on anything specific. Strong correlation, limited causation. My priors on the question would probably dominate my response - if I was concerned about the vaccine causing deaths, I would likely have reported a death from vaccines. If not, then I would have said no.
In general, it seems like when you ask a factual question with partisan/CW valence on a poll, and the respondents don't know much about the factual question, they answer the "whose side are you on" question instead. That is, if you ask Republican-voting biologists, they'll nearly all tell you the Theory of Evolution is basically how living stuff came to be, but if you ask Republican-voting normies whose vaguely-remembered high school biology class may have mentioned Darwin a few times, they'll answer that evolution is a lie--they don't really know one way or another, they're just answering the "whose side are you on" question. Democratic normies will far more often tell you evolution is true, but probably could do little better in explaining why than the Republican normies could in explaining why evolution is really an atheist lie of some kind.
I wonder if this was happening with the poll here? It seems like a bizarre result.
Bingo!!!!
I wonder if it would be possible to sprinkle in two or three objectively correct questions, such that if they were answered wrong the results of the survey might be removed as tainted. For example; Pew Research had a survey about classic liberals where they only chose results from people who gave a definition-conforming description of what a classic liberal was in a multiple choice question.
I also responded to Scott with this, but this is definitely an active area of development in polling that is being done: https://www.civisanalytics.com/blog/understanding-satisficers/
Link to that survey? That sounds amazing!
Or a hint?
Good for Pew.
But it's very rare for pollsters to ask questions about how objectively well informed respondents are, and even rarer for them to disqualify the ignorant because that can increase the need for sample size, which is costly.
Depending on the quality of polling, satisficing behavior on polling is a strong default assumption for weird/dumb results on a survey, and depending on how they did panel sourcing, it's a problem that's increased over time. (See this link for a more in depth discussion, as well as a discussion of how some pollsters combat it in their survey design: https://www.civisanalytics.com/blog/understanding-satisficers/ )
Interestingly, I ran into someone at a coffee shop several months ago claiming to be a nurse who reported to the barista that her husband died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease disease spread by prions in a vaccine. She said didn't dare warn anyone at work because of "pressure." The barista tried to rope me into the conversation, but I just replied awkwardly that it was sad and left as quickly as possible!
I suspect that her husband had in fact died (since prion diseases are caused by misfolded self-proteins, they can spontaneously develop -- see Fatal Familial or Fatal Sporadic insomnia) and she misattributed his death to the vaccine due to a severe case of grief and too much online politics. Or perhaps she had schizophrenia and was disconnected from reality?
It was all very surreal.
At any rate, I wouldn't wholly discount the idea that a good portion of those results come from people misinterpreting real deaths.
Covid did weird thing to the health system. The EMS organizations I volunteer with noted that 911 calls were down. Cynically, we and the Emergency Departments all concluded that "people actually do know what the ER is for, they just didn't care until now".
And then we started looking at the numbers and found out that we were seeing far fewer strokes and heart attacks, either in-progress or after death. Maybe it was just a statistical anomaly for us.
Another possibility is that people included not just those people who were in their household but had a personal connection to. And this easily gets out of hand, much as most peoples' friends having more friends than they do. So if you have someone who dies of a stroke or heart attack (and in their mind clot = vaccine complication), and they have 3 household members, 8 neighbors, a few good friends, and a dozen family members, you are getting a lot of amplification based on the network effect.
This seems plausible.
People engaged in a survey *want* to give you data - that's why they are doing it for you in the first place.
So sometimes they will stretch the facts to enable themselves to provide what they consider to be useful data.
Thus great aunt edna's next door neighbour suddenly becomes 'family' for the purposes of the response.
I would think some respondents would stretch the definition of "have died from the vaccine", I have a family member who died of a heart attack five months after their 3rd shot, the anti-vax members of my family all swear it was because of the vaccine.
There seems to be a conflation here, reading the above it says around 3% said in their *household* but around 8% said in their *family*.
"Household" is "me, my partner (if any) and kids (if any)". People answering that question probably really do know if it was the vaccine or not.
"Family" could be Elderly Parents not living with me, Granny Sue, Uncle George, Cousin Ida, Bill's sister-in-law, Jane's nephew's aunt on his dad's side, etc. A lot of people could have gotten sick and died of other things/died of natural causes after getting the Covid vaccine.
People thinking "Well I read all this stuff in the papers about how people were dying after getting the vaccine, and Cousin Ida got the vaccine and got real sick and then she died a while later so yeah maybe it was the vaccine" answering "yes" to "did anyone in your family die?", when really Ida died of her long-standing kidney problems etc.
If grandma lives in your house, she's part of your household too.
I had a similar thought, so I checked through Scott's links The survey (and the article Scott cites) actually say "household" in both questions.
Scott, I suggest amending that in the post to both saying "household".
I’ll have a read. I agree with Kirsch about a whole lot (the conduct of the public health authorities & the drug companies was and remains despicable), but I’ll venture a guess:
Given his subject matter, a large proportion of his audience are likely to be engaging with his content on the basis of their own experience (or that of loved ones) with vaccines, whether or not you believe them. So you’re naturally going to get a disproportionate number answering that way.
One look at VAERS, a notoriously under-reported database, should suggest there’s been excessive number of adverse events. This is confirmed by the group-life insurance numbers and the success of funeral-related companies of late, both of which are post-2020 phenomena (which cripples the official contention that it’s all fallout from COVID-19—hordes of millennials weren’t dying in 2020). The Pfizer documents (and the fact that they wanted to hide them for the better part of the century) undergird this alternative explanation.
It’s arguably not enough evidence for proof, but it’s enough to discard the official line, and it’s enough that a real investigation should be mandatory. Simultaneously, we can look at efficacy. Have we seen just how ineffective these vaccines have been?
Pfizer and Moderna knew this; they gave out dangerous dosages just to get it to work long enough to fake the trials. Even at peak efficacy, which was many strains and years ago, it was gone in months and it was and still is rebounding into negative efficacy (and it’s dose-dependent, which is an ominous sign for defenders).
“Safe & effective” has been of the biggest lies of the past few years, but I’m fully prepared to show you a long list of them complete with the evidence to the contrary.
I discuss VAERS in the predecessor to this article, see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies . The exact mechanism I mention turns out to not be quite correct, but I think commenters filled in the rest of the story at eg https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies/comment/11358743
Can you link to the life insurance and funeral information (and explain why you don't think the excess deaths are caused by COVID itself)?
Yeah, let me look through my stuff. I’ll get it to you.
Thanks!
Because excess deaths start rising at the same time vaccinations do, in multiple countries. Whilst the old chestnut 'correlation doesn't equal causation' is correct, there is often no correlation at all with Covid itself. Instead, we are told excess deaths are delayed effects from Covid. Maybe, I'm not ruling it out but I think it is disingenuous to not even consider vaccine deaths as the cause. We know they have happened (whilst official numbers are small, VAERS & Yellow Card show them to be much higher) and we know doctor's are unlikely to report vaccine deaths unless there is an obvious and direct link.
"Because excess deaths start rising at the same time vaccinations do, in multiple countries."
Can you provide some backstory that I must be missing (e.g. we are only talking about 19-29 year olds or something ... your millennials comment suggests thi )? Because excess deaths in California began rising in April 2020. Is the claim that for a specific age group the excess deaths didn't rise until sometime after the vaccines became available?
You can see a correlation in all ages.
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/correlation-between-increased-mortality
Pre-vaccine excess deaths is another story - Covid + lack of adequate treatment.
Here are excess deaths graphed against covid deaths and against vaccinations, for 100 countries:
https://twitter.com/hmatejx/status/1442457789721415680?s=20
It's very easy to see that excess deaths are correlated with covid and not with vaccines.
I don't know about other countries, but in the U.S. there have been statistically excessive deaths from all causes during most weeks since the end of March 2020:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
To anyone familiar with recent events, the major increases and decreases of excess deaths from any cause correlates closely with the rise and fall of covid cases a few weeks before.
They must have misheard *because* it isn’t borne out by facts. You know what else is not borne out by facts? Lies, hoaxes, and most often CONFABULATIONS. These aren’t lies because the person uttering it believes it to be true. For example the widespread instances of “furries” in schools (kids who “transitioned” into being animals and were accommodated by schools who didn’t want to be viewed as discriminatory so they provided litter boxes. Great story - even repeated by Joe Rogan - except it wasn’t true!) Do you have any idea how many anti-Vaxxers swear they had a friend or relative who got autism from vaccines? Same thing is going on with Covid deaths. Stop pretending all misinformation is basically the same!
I took a time-boxed peek at the Pollfish data. The 1500 results were splint into 3 batches of 500. I arbitrarily selected the Jul 4 file to look at.
In that file, there were 36 respondents who reported a household member had died from he vaccine.
Focusing on those responses, I noticed a few interesting patterns.
Of those 36 respondents, 10 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from COVID and death of a household member from the vaccine. I'm skeptical that 10 out of 500 people were unfortunate enough to have 2 household members die: one from COVID and one from the vaccine. (Especially because these are not large households; 4 of these 10 report that they have 1 other household member, and 5 of these 10 report having 2-4 other household members.)
Of these 36 respondents, 20 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from the vaccine and "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" I'm skeptical that 55% of people who had a household member die of a vaccine would plan to get the vaccine themselves.
Of these 36 respondents, there are even 4 who experienced a surprising number of adverse affects from the vaccine (Myocarditis, Pericarditis, AND Bell's Palsy ) requiring hospitalization in addition to having a household member die from the vaccine. Of these 4, 2 selected all of the following: "It will likely shorten my lifespan", "I am now unable to hold a job", "I am now unable to work a full day", "It impacts my personal life", "It is a minor annoyance". Those two are planning to get the vaccine again.
There's some overlap between these respondents. Ignoring all of them drops from 36 who had a household member die of the vaccine to 12. I don't see obvious inconsistencies in these responses.
However, there seems to be a broader issue with the survey design. They look at average time to complete each question, but average doesn't seem like the right measure here (3 people took 10+ minutes to answer; summed, the fastest 250 responses took about as long as those slowest 3). Of the 500 responses, most people seem to answer 7-10 questions. I timed myself just reading those questions silently in my head (not thinking about the answers). Of three attempts, my fastest was a bit over 17 seconds. 40 people completed the survey in 17 seconds or less. I'm skeptical it's possible for someone to provide a quality response to the survey that quickly. 225 people (nearly half) completed the survey in less than 31 seconds. I think that's the fastest I could answer if I were seeing the questions for the first time.
It seems like Pollfish's model may encourage hasty, poor quality responses; "Pollfish uses non-monetary incentives like an extra life in a game or access to premium content." (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-the-pollfish-methodology-works/) It seems like that creates a misalignment of incentives; the respondent is in a hurry to get back to whatever they were doing. They provide survey fraud protection, and claim it filters suspiciously quick or suspiciously consistent answers (e.g., the same answer for all questions), but it seems to be overlooking obviously problematic responses in this case. (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-pollfish-prevents-fraudulent-responses/)
Do you have a link to the pollfish data?
My guess was that Kirsch very carefully structured the survey's target population to have more antivaxxers, and then declined to mention this. I didn't find a way to confirm or refute this in the limited time I spent.
Open https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/07/twice-as-many-vaccine-deaths-as-covid-deaths-in-u-s-households-poll-finds/ and Ctrl+f for "The data are available here". There should be three links to XLSX files. One of the tabs has the raw response data.
Thanks!
Looking at the june 30 data, nothing fishy jumps out at me for my hypothesis.
I checked your hypothesis and it matches pretty well- when I divide the response time by the number of answered questions, the median rate was 1 question per 4.3 seconds. Almost 75% answered in under 6 seconds per q, and about 25% took under 3.3 seconds per q.
Thanks for looking into this. I love the idea of this person whom the vaccine put in the hospital with Bell's palsy, left them unable to work, *killed* a family member, and yet they can't wait to schedule their next dose.
Thanks for writing this up! I also took a look at the data and found similar issues. Came back to write it up & was happy to see that you'd already done so (& had dived deeper than I had). I can at least confirm that the Jun 30 results are similarly bizarre.
This is a really good comment
Although, from that article, an additional 7% are “lizardmen-adjacent,” (“of note, an additional 7% of Americans are “not sure” whether lizardmen are running the Earth or not,”) so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My guess is that a big chunk of those people understood the question as "Do you have anyone in your house who died after they got the COVID vaccine?" instead of "from the COVID vaccine," or instead of mishearing it.
Right. If you ask people 'did anyone die from the vaccine' and 8% say yes, a simple explanation is that this 8% of people is confused and wrong.
Lizardman's constant is probably smaller than more plausible incorrect beliefs, like 'the experimental vaccine killed people.'
This is plausible, particularly if the old/infirm/immunocompromised were more likely to get the vaccine.
Approximately what percentage of households have a member who died (of any cause) within the past year?
Looks like 2021 had ~124 million households and ~3.5 million deaths. Some of those will be in the same household but 3% seems like a reasonable guess
You think it's more likely that millions of people died of the COVID vaccine than that 8% of people gave inaccurate responses to a survey?
No, not at all, I'm describing a different reason for that inaccurate response than mishearing the question
I think you misread my comment as a reply to yours rather than to the same person you replied to.
Ah I did, my bad. Thanks for clarifying!
Oh god, the irony 🤣
Yeah misreading/mishearing is super common, see the the the Scott often drops in his articles
I think people interpreting the question broadly, as in 'do you know of anyone who died of the covid vaccine?', and then basing their response on some viral facebook post they saw, is more likely. I personally know several people who said they 'knew' someone who died of the vaccine, and cited something like that.
"I personally know several people who said they 'knew' someone who died of the vaccine, "
What? Several people!
Who are you hanging around with?
If I ever heard someone say this, I would be like: what exactly is their name and press for details.
Or I might think, well there is likely a crackpot that I should stay clear from.
> They misheard the question? Jesus. That’s pretty desperate
Really? It was my very first thought. I mean, have you never answered a survey? Sometimes a person does just click "yes" when they really meant "no."
It struck me that way too. I checked the data from the survey (there are some links elsewhere in the thread; you can also find it by following links in the article) and checked the first third of the poll's responses (500 of 1500). 45 of those 500 respondents (9%) answered Yes to "Did anyone else in your household die from the COVID vaccine?"
I looked through the dataset for anything that might give me insight into those cases. Of the 45 respondents mentioned above, 22 answered Yes, 5 answered Unsure, and 18 answered No to "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" which was also in the poll. Your priors may cause you to disagree with this, but I believe that if 50% of the people who answered that a household member died from the Covid vaccine also answered that they intend to get another Covid vaccine, then something about the data is inaccurate.
Also note, Scott says the Daily Sceptic didn't do a sanity check of the poll. But their article has a paragraph that does exactly that.
> The proportion of people in this poll reporting serious vaccine injury is considerably higher than in similar surveys, by a factor of 10 or more, the reason for which is unclear and needs to be investigated. We can do a sense check: there are around 120 million households in the U.S. If 3.6% of them have had a Covid death (as per the survey) then that would give 4.3 million Covid deaths. Official figures show around 1 million Covid deaths in the U.S. This suggests the survey is exaggerating results, perhaps due to a self-selection bias among those who respond.
>
> Nonetheless, these are what the respondents to this poll have reported and should not be quickly dismissed. Governments should be doing far more to look into why polls of the general public – not just this one but those by governments themselves – find high proportions of vaccine recipients reporting serious, debilitating and fatal reactions to the vaccines that governments insist are safe.
Are you seriously suggesting that people don't misunderstand questions, and that some questions are more likely to be misunderstood than others based on people's priors?
My unwritten response to the first post was "Isn't this something obvious that we already know?" I half remember you having written on the topic years ago. That the media lies by means other than straight up fabricating empirically untrue things is so obvious to be not worth mentioning.
Looking at what the media does and declaring that it doesn't lie is however much like having a model of unhealthy eating which only defining having candy as being unhealthy and declaring the person who eats 4 double cheese burgers a day as technically healthy. It misses the point entirely. If someone knows the truth and constructs what they espouse carefully to get people to believe something else they are doing the thing we don't like about lying.
I also thought it was obvious, which was why I was surprised to get so much pushback!
I think maybe the headspace of most people is that a lie isn’t a specific thing about giving a false fact but rather a false or misleading worldview. Then they just reject the nuance. Media is factual and full of lies isn’t a contradiction in that use case.
This is also how I tend to see it as well. It’s interesting that the limits of large organizations seem to stop at being, mostly, factual but for whatever reason can’t produce helpful or clarifying context at scale.
I’m in favor of a decentralized editor type of system where all these stories can be challenged and adjudicated through adversarial challenge. That’s the only way I have ever conceived of where you could force right behavior.
Scott, I heartily echo what you say here. In 2019 I tried researching every bit of news I suspected was fake. It took a TON of time. Most of it turned out as you've said – factually true, but out of context (or sometimes completely true).
As a logic teacher, I appreciate your pointing out that we mostly lean on our priors when we evaluate “fakeness.” But I’m also uneasy about that, for the following reason.
My priors took a hit from the mother of all reality bombs 3 years ago. I’d heard for years, from questionable sources, that the government in China was harvesting organs from political prisoners. The story went that the Chinese Communist Party was rounding up minorities & dissidents in concentration camps, picking out the healthiest, and killing them for organ transplants – with or without anesthesia. By “questionable sources,” I mean elderly Asian people holding cardboard signs on street corners in the major city where I lived. They’d walk up to people and try, in broken English, to get signatures to stop the organ harvesting. I don't usually believe people with signs on street corners, so I always ignored them.
Meanwhile, I was making Korean and Hong Konger friends at the university I worked at. Eventually enough of them insisted this story was true that I had to check it out. A little press was trickling out – for example, the “Bloody Harvest” report by Matas, Kilgour, and Gutmann (overview here: https://thediplomat.com/2016/06/organ-harvesting-in-china/), followed by an international tribunal report (overview here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests-organs-detainees-tribunal-concludes-n1018646).
But fact-checking media is a pain. “I’ll go straight to the sources,” I thought. I booked appointments at the university with (1) a former ambassador to China, and (2) a professor from mainland China who specialized in CCP operations.
The results were shocking. Both the professor and the ambassador said the same thing. The worst was true. The CCP had been murdering for organs for about 20 years. The CCP put dissidents in concentration camps at massive rates. The healthiest prisoners were usually religious, from a group called the Falun Gong (indigenous Chinese), though there were also lots of Uighurs and Tibetans and house Christians. And the governments in the West had known all along. Political leaders, mainstream media, international corporations – they all knew. Democrats knew. Republicans knew. Bush knew. Obama knew. Everyone in a position to know, knew.
“Why hasn’t anyone kicked up a fuss?” I demanded. “This is outrageous!”
Both of them gave the same answer. Business interests. China is the world’s biggest trading partner. If you make the CCP mad by airing its dirty laundry, it will cut off your business relationships and bank accounts, after stealing your trade secrets. If you tell the American public about it, they’ll get mad and refuse to buy Made in China, and instead want Made in America or something else both ethical and inconvenient for large corporations.
These revelations destroyed my world. They were much more outrageous than anything in the fake news. If our elites were actually Lizard People, they couldn’t have more scales between their toes. It wasn't just one person like Obama or Bush making a cold-blooded decision to ignore things worse than Hitler. It was an entire bipartisan sub-culture at the highest levels of our political, corporate, and journalistic classes, cooperating with and actively suppressing news about horrors as bad as the Holocaust, for financial reasons.
I mean the comparison with the Holocaust. Numbers-wise, the CCP is almost on par with the Nazis. The UN estimates 1 million prisoners in concentration camps in Xinjiang alone (recent overview of the UN report here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-un-idUSKBN1KV1SU). But the Nazis genuinely seem not to have gotten into cannibalizing the organs of their enemies. Also, they didn’t really get into torturing people to death slowly with blood and gore. They liked the clean efficiency of gas chambers and ovens. But the CCP is strapping live humans to a stretcher, conscious and without painkiller, while a surgeon cuts out a fresh lung.
And even now, in almost 2023, most of our Western elite are just shrugging and going along with this.
This totally explodes the reliability of our priors regarding geopolitical realities. We were kept in the dark about THIS for 20 years. How much else are we in the dark about?
Did the CCP intentionally create Covid in a lab and then leak it? My priors alone are no help here. Except to say: Why not? They’ve been doing worse things for 20 years. I’d have to actually research the issue to find out.
Did the US government collude with Big Pharma to produce a rushed-and-ineffective Covid vaccine that would make them a billion dollars but that might accidentally end up killing more people than it helped? Why not? They’ve been colluding with worse-than-Hitler for 20 years to make a billion dollars. My priors are of no help here. I’d have to actually research the issue to find out.
Did a small cadre of Democrats steal the 2020 election? Why not? Both Democrats and Republicans have been colluding with worse-than-Hitler for 20 years. Why would they suddenly get all fair-and-ethical over elections at home? My priors are no help here. Etc.
Has the media been running cover for all this? Why not? They’ve been running cover for worse-than-Hitler for 20 years. Etc…
So our priors are no help. But before getting too paranoid, I should point out that this is why I read your blog. It's why your work here is so crucial. It’s not just that you do deep dives on these types of issues. You show *how* to do the deep dives. You're a master of identifying your own priors (and ours) and then looking at the data from all angles. And we all learn not just what to think but how to do it. That skill is what we need more of, in our current messes.
Also – please get involved with ending organ harvesting in China. This is my cardboard sign on the street corner of Astral Codex Ten.
International China Tribunal here: https://chinatribunal.com/about-etac/
Sample aid organization here: https://chinaaid.org
Well this is... disturbing. I will say though that it seems like you may be conflating "number of Uighurs et al in forced camps" with "number of people China has killed and had their organs harvested". Could you share some of your more solid english-language sources on this?
I was extremely disturbed by this as well. My understanding is that the use of harvested organs has now stopped or at least greatly diminished. There was noise about it at the time, and I think it became clear that it couldn't go on.
If you start digging into Chinese horrors, though, it's only going to get worse. Forced late term abortions were carried out openly for decades.
As someone who lives here and tries to maintain some psychological balance, I think that most of the worst excesses have improved, with the occupation of Xinjiang being the obvious move in the wrong direction.
"If you tell the American public about it, they’ll get mad and refuse to buy Made in China, and instead want Made in America or something else both ethical and inconvenient for large corporations."
Why would it be inconvenient to, e.g., the editorial staff of the New York Times for the American public to refuse to buy Made in China? Or, if not the New York Times, some second-tier reputable newspaper wanting to move up by breaking a new story. It might be inconvenient to a lot of large corporations that *aren't* primarily in the news business, but the people who own those corporations don't get to set the editorial policy of major newspapers.
I believe, but with only moderate confidence due to not having researched the matter more than casually and our not having e.g. a Scott Alexander deep dive into the subject, that:
In the recent past the Chinese government harvested organs from some number of prisoners, and this may be ongoing.
The fraction of prisoners who have their organs harvested is <<100%, so that "millions of political prisoners + organ harvesting = Holocaustian levels of mass murder" is false or at least unsupported
The evidence for much of this is squishy enough that it can't really be proven to the level that a major newspaper is going to want to risk a libel suit or the like over it.
I also don't much care, because millions of political prisoners in concentration camps, with or without organ harvesting, is sufficient to put China in first place for the "Evil Empire" of the 21st century (so far, and Putin is making his own bid for that title). But it's an Evil Empire with enough thermonuclear missiles that, again with or without the organ-harvesting, I'm not going to press for a crusade to vanquish this evil quite yet.
Well, North America has (potentially) been doing things much worse than Stalin or Hitler for some years now (though it depends what your model of the future is like).
And the various US-backed wars and coups since WW2 weren't great either, though Putin has probably managed to top them by now ?
What "things" has North American (does that mean the US AND Canada?) been doing that is much worse than Stalin or Hitler for years?
The coups are another matter. I am not sure they have made things much worse for the countries involved and I doubt they have made things better.
For what it's worth, we have not been kept in the dark about this. I feel like because you live in a place where people have cardboard signs talking about this, you got a dose of skepticism that most people did not get. My impression is that most people have heard of this, and had no real reason to doubt it. It was a prime plot point in World War Z, for instance, that the zombie virus was able to spread so quickly because chinese organs are constantly making their way around the world, and that when china discovered the zombie virus and started doing research on the infected, the last step of the experiments would be to add them to the normal queue of organ harvesting.
It's not like World War Z was all that fringe a book, either.
My impression is that one of the reason this doesn't stop is because if trying to stop harvesting organs, we would stop having organs for transplants. That a lot of very rich people, who live in the sort of 'second world' countries, source their kidneys and corneas and hearts from this process. Or people who go to brazil for their surgery because it's cheaper, stuff like that.
This might just be my bias because this is how it was presented in a lot of the media articles I've read about this, though. It's sort of like the problem of slavery, yeah the slavers are awful people, but it's the demand for slaves incentivizes their behavior in the first place, and there's some degree of complicity outside china in that all those organs are going *somewhere* and if they stopped flowing, that loss would be felt.
strange! i saw all the China staff on normal media. it's just... part of my world view. people don't care about things far away from them. it's happen all the time. the Holocaust is actually good example - the most famous genocide, and nobody truly cared, except the victims. but even the victims (or their successors, actually) don't care enough about such things to avoid selling weapons to dictators who are doing some bad, bad shit in their countries.
people care a lot about their family and friends. less about their social group, ethnic group, other groups their belong to. we care very little about people we don't know far far away.
why did you ever had different opinion?
I think the pushback is largely related to different definitions of "lie".
Media outlets generally have a very specific belief that they are trying to instill in their readers for any given article -- they know what they want the takeaway to be. Often, the takeaway they are trying to leave their readers with is false. One can reasonably claim that setting out to make someone believe a false claim in this way is "lying", even if the means by which you do it doesn't involve directly stating any false factual claims.
I think the claim you're making is correct, but characterizing this behavior -- intentional, often grievous deception by means of context distortion and selective presentation -- as "not lying" seems overly generous. I think the correct top-line representation of this phenomenon is "the media lies all the time (asterix, their particular method of lying doesn't involve directly stating false claims)".
My exact issue is that this whole line of analysis is being extremely charitable to media of all stripes.
I see 'lying' as entailing more than just fabricating a false fact, and more about the *intent* of presenting information so as to mislead or misinform, especially in a way that causes the target to form a false belief that the speaker wants them to form.
In the broadest sense this can come down solely to how one *frames* the facts.
But the more central example is simply removing any and all context that might lead the listener to a conclusion that the speaker wants them to avoid, whilst emphasizing facts that support the conclusion, *even though you possess all the relevant information and could easily convey it.*
Still seems like 'lying' to me.
I think it's an ironic case of Scott doing exactly what he's accusing the media of doing (probably accidentally?). It's kind of a motte and bailey game everyone is playing.
"Media don't lie."
"They say false things all the time! What about X, Y, and Z?"
"Not technically a false statement!"
"But they were absolutely misleading. Can you say they're not lying when they say a ton of stuff that's effectively no different? The intent is to communicate false ideas to their audience."
"Sure, but they didn't say things that were technically incorrect. They may even have uncritically convinced themselves into believing these things, so it doesn't count."
"That's a very narrow definition of lying. It's the same broad claim, backed down to a narrow definition that you're saying the media are doing."
"Exactly! You're starting to get my point."
"Sure, but I expect more from you. I come here for better, more critical analysis and a more thorough interrogation of the breadth of the subject. You're not just some idiot off the street, you have a reputation to maintain that shouldn't be trying to hide headline statements behind dubious narrower claims."
"Same with the news! You're starting to get it?"
"No. I stopped having those expectations of the news years ago."
I would maybe agree if his point was to prove this to defend the media. He however ends each section with "this is awful, but not technically a lie" and at the end provides why this is important ("censorship of dumb evil news" is something people imagine is possible but actually isn't). The logic is, AFAICT:
If [media can be sorted into truth and lies] => censorship can work.
First one is false.
Ergo, second one is false.
The argument does not fall apart if we redefine lie, as "lie is hard to define" still makes the first argument false, and this second one is false.
Couldn't we summarize the whole point here as saying that the media rarely lie in a direct way, but often mislead by omitting relevant context, or choosing which information to report/not report, or by framing the available facts in a way that pushes forward a desired narrative? Because this is what I took from Scott's initial post.
And this is a problem for policing misinformation, because omitted relevant context, or misleading framing, is subjective and very different from actually saying stuff that isn't true.
When he posted the first essay on this I wondered if he was doing a bit where he presented some accurate facts without context or with misleading context and then would put forth a longer writing actually analyzing the issue in great detail. It would have been a clever transition.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt but it's interesting that he's seemingly coming in defense of a conclusion that sort of absolves the media outlets of 'wrongdoing' if only because he doesn't even posit that they might be *intending* to make the signal/noise ratio worse in order to keep their audience misinformed.
When it really shouldn't be difficult to say "if they have all the facts of the story available to them and fail to *accurately* report *ALL* the facts to their audience, that's probably bad."
I think he's making allowance for the probability that many of them are fooling themselves with motivated reasoning, isolated demands for rigor, and a host of other failure modes rationalists work hard to avoid (but still aren't perfect themselves at eliminating).
I also think he's right to assume many/most biased reporting believes the underlying ideas they push, even if that one reporter failed to find enough evidence to prove their point. It's so easy to fool yourself that this should be considered the default probably. (Hanlon's razor)
It's a harder problem when you have a bunch of people who sincerely believe the crap they manufacture. It's easier if you're opposed by actively evil people who act like villains from Captain Planet ("I'm dumping sludge into the river because I hate nature!"), But that's rarely the case.
With honest actors, you have to insist on better norms of reporting, but it's hard to get thousands of reporters to study the Sequences.
I'm not saying it's never the case that you're dealing with a malicious actor. I'm sure there are editors and sources who know what they're doing, and use gullible reporters to signal boost a narrative they want pushed. But I think most reporters more likely have bad epistemic habits. Bias is a strong drug, and many people take that drug every day.
As far as I understand these two articles, Scott is using a narrow definition of "lie" and is upfront about it. I just don't see Scott making the broad claim anywhere, which in my reading invalidates your argument. It's not motte-and-bailey when you shout every other paragraph "I'm talking about this specific bailey, I know you all want to confuse it with this motte but I'm really purposely talking about the bailey right here and not this or that motte!"
You might simply disagree that this is an article worth writing, but I will counter that "the media is often misleading" wouldn't make for a better one. Also, "this is not the article I think you should've written" is a different critique than "this article is wrong".
Most importantly, you may have missed the purpose of Scott's argument about the media rarely lying explicitly, which is to support the argument that you can't just implement some "good kind of censorship", as many people are imagining it, by simply censoring outright false reporting.
Minor point: I think you've inverted the terms motte and bailey. The motte is the tower (the narrow point you retreat to when challenged) and the bailey is the open space (broader idea that's more difficult to defend).
I read both posts, and I understood the points he was making just fine. I thought they were good points. Indeed, it was interesting that he challenged his readers to find examples of factual inaccuracy in news stories and they didn't find any significant examples.
However, Scott also complains that people object to his statement that "the media rarely lies". Scott gets to choose his own titles, and he seems to know he's making an insurance claim. Indeed, he subtitled the first post saying, "with a title like that, obviously I'll be making a very nitpicky technical point".
Scott seems to implicitly understand people will object to his characterization of the media as "rarely lying", even as he complains about it. I'm just pointing out that he should not use an overbroad term to refer to a very specific phenomenon, then complain that people interpret him as making an overbroad claim.
This isn't the same as saying, "well I'd have used a different title because of stylistic reasons". This is saying, "Your title doesn't match your data." This is why these posts feel wrong to do many of us. We have personally experienced media misleading us, repeating things they should know are wrong, not challenging outrageous claims with obvious context, etc. It's the same as lying. It is lying. So the statement, "the media rarely lies" is not correct. The narrow, nitpicky point is fine - indeed it's an important point, that is unfortunately overshadowed by a bad title.
The media lies all the time. The way Scott framed this whole discussion undermined the point he was trying to make.
It seems like any analysis of a problem has to start with establishing some ground facts. If we can all agree that the media aren't actually lying, then that opens other avenues for exploring how the public are being misled by the media.
Yeah. The definition of "lie" that I grew up with was "any communication with the intent to deceive." You can lie while telling the truth, as long as your purpose was to inculcate a false impression among your audience.
From defamation law, there's the concept of *reckless disregard for the truth*. Webster defines it as
> disregard of the truth or falsity of a defamatory statement by a person who is highly aware of its probable falsity or entertains serious doubts about its truth or when there are obvious reasons to doubt the veracity and accuracy of a source
In this case, the media (on all sides) is full of this--repeating statements that sound plausible if you ignore those obvious questions, not asking questions, closing your eyes to the obvious issues, all in service of pushing a message.
That's well over the line of what I would call a lie.
Remember that the oath a fact witness takes before testifying in Court is "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
I will freely admit that news outlets aren't testifying under oath, but it gets to the idea that when people have an *EXPECTATION* that the person is telling "the whole truth" and "nothing but the truth" then it is still, shall we say, *problematic* if the speaker omits truthful facts which were nonetheless relevant.
And since there's no cross-examining attorney available to push back and elicit the missing facts, the listener has little recourse other than doing their own research, which *defeats the point of listening to a news outlet in the first place.*
<3 to tomdhunt and Faceh. I made this point in another post, but you both did it better. "Deliberately misinforming" (for political purposes, for power, for money, etc.) might not be "making up stuff directly," but it is bad.
I get Scott's point, I just think the framing is ... off.
The problem is on the policy side. It would probably be practical to have a law which bans media organizations from publishing things which are false. The court system is set up to handle all sorts of factual disputes. "Did CNN claim Greenland was in the Southern Hemisphere?" is the kind of thing a court can address.
But trying to determine whether "enough" context was provided is a much thing to adjudicate.
Yes, I basically endorse Scott's further conclusions about the impossibility of regulating this by any practical bright-line rule (whether that be in the courts, the regulatory agencies, social media platforms, or whatever).
In practice, any agency that tries to suppress "disinformation" will end up allowing information that is congenial to that agency's political aims, and suppressing information that is contrary to them, with no regard for truth on either end.
So, suppose I'm trying to be honest and accurate in explaining something to someone. I have an existing set of beliefs which may be wrong but which I've arrived at with some care and think are likely right. (For example, that covid is bad to get, worse as you get older/fatter/sicker, that vaccines decrease your risk of dying or getting very sick from covid by quite a bit, that some treatments like paxlovid do the same, that covid vaccines are overall pretty safe, etc.).
Now, we can probably agree that I must not lie in service of conveying an accurate understanding--if tomorrow there's a paper that indicates that covid vaccines are more dangerous than covid for people under 20, I must not lie about what the paper says. But I have a choice about how much emphasis to give the paper--I can say "yes, there was one paper that said the vaccine was more dangerous than covid for very low-risk people, and that's possible, but weighing all the evidence, I think it's unlikely." Or I can not mention that paper at all and just talk about the CDC guidance. Or I can trumpet that paper and write a headline that says "COVID VACCINE A DEADLY THREAT, ALL IS LOST" with an article that links to some n=30 study with a p-value of 0.04 showing that under-20 recipients reported longer symptoms with the vaccine than covid[1].
There are a lot of ways to be misleading there. But there's also this difference between reporting the latest news and trying to report an accurate understanding of what's going on. I think I want both of these, but I want people to be clear about which they're doing.
There's another issue where I might have an agenda other than conveying an accurate understanding to you. Like, do I see my role as conveying my best understanding about covid to you, or convincing you to do what I think you should do, or supporting the public health authorities, or what? Those are all different goals. Is your role telling me what's what as best you can, or "responsible journalism" that ends up meaning misleading me in a good cause?
[1] To be fair, my 17 year old has been vaccinated three times and has had covid twice; he's gotten about as sick from the vaccine as from covid each time (aka, several days of feeling lousy and not wanting to get out of bed), and so isn't real excited about getting vaccinated again.
I thought Scott was mostly pushing pack against the idea that Infowars and NYT (or whatever hero and villain you want to pick in the media) were doing something categorically different, when really they are doing the same thing to different degrees.
Whether you choose to call anything misleading “lying” or define a lie as strictly an intentional statement of an untrue fact, it doesn’t really matter - essentially all media does the former frequently and the latter rarely.
Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed Kim Prather an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim in an interview in the LA Times that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-ocean-swimming-surfing-safe-beaches-los-angeles
I think a lot of people don't separate in their minds the provable lies and the tricks meant to get people to believe untrue things. When I watch the John Oliver episode on the women's national team's compensation package for instance I know that everything he says on the topic is technically accurate but I come away feeling viscerally lied to because it is so clear that the presentation is intentionally not addressing even the most basic pushback.
I think it's more like "people care about technicalities in their favor, and don't care about technicalities that are not in their favor." Ordinary people who are intentionally deceiving someone will often play word games to make their statements technically true (which shows they're tracking the distinction and sometimes care) but people who have been deceived don't actually care about that defense. I suspect this "don't _technically_ lie" instinct may have evolved to make it harder for your victim to convince _others_ to punish you, rather than to make your victim less mad.
I think there's also an element of "However well I personally manage to defend myself against tricks, that's obviously the reasonable standard that everyone should meet. Therefore, tricks that work against me are evil, but if you fall for a trick that wouldn't work on me then it's your own fault for being foolish." A while ago in ACX comments, I complained about stores that set all their prices to end with 99 cents or put one crappy item on a huge discount so they can advertise "up to 90% off", and I got a bunch of people objecting that those things "aren't lying" (even though the stores are doing extra work for the sole purpose of tricking people). I suspect this is because people think of themselves as immune to such petty tricks (though most of them are wrong).
Of course, another plausible hypothesis is "a bunch of people have different opinions, and there's enough readers on this blog that a bunch of people will disagree with you no matter what you say."
This seems like a classic case where the readers who agree have no motivation to comment, so the comment section is biased towards the minority (?) who disagree.
That’s a good observation. I didn’t comment on that piece because when I saw he had defined lie in that way I didn’t really disagree other than to maybe feel it wasn’t a very helpful definition. Then again I’d do think the distinction was important.
People automatically interpret this as you defending the media. Arguments as Soldiers.
The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things.
I consider it obvious, for a pedantically literal definition of "lying". But I also consider it useless, because a source that says pedantically literal things with such a perversely-chosen context that a reasonable person taking it as face value would come to a false conclusion is no improvement over a source that just makes up things that are literally false. And in almost all contexts, I use the word "lying" indistinguishably for both cases.
There are some mainstream media outlets that, outside of the most scissory subjects, I'm willing to take what they say at face value without e.g. skimming the relevant wikipedia page, skimming the "talk" section of the wikipedia page, and checking out some of the references from those. But that's the interesting and useful question - does a source provide information from which one can safely draw a conclusion without doing an independent mini-dive into the subject? Not, "does the particular method of their deception include pedantically literal falsehoods?", because if I have to research the matter to get the context right I'll discover the falsehoods along the way.
We never ever remember the original sensory input. Everybody trying to remember a time media misinformed just retrieved the already processed "they lied". It would take re-reading the original media with an effort on re-analyzing the content to realize that it was, in fact, "just" misinformation and not lie.
Same happened to me when I read the original article, I doubt anybody is immune. The trick is to be aware of how memories are encoded and realize that this kind of judgement call will always require reprocessing. You can't trust cached information for this.
To me it was obvious that the New York Times works this way, but I was a little surprised to learn that Infowars apparently meets that standard as well.
Seconded!
Same here.
My model (although I didn't think too deeply about it) was that if a media is "sufficiently mainstream", if will avoid publishing outright lies, because many of its customers might stop buying it if they learned that outright lies were published.
But I assumed that there is a mindkilling threshold, where the majority of customers are crazy fanatics, and even if you show them that some specific information X was a lie, they will not care, because it was still an argument-soldier fighting for their side, and besides "who cares, they might have got this one tiny detail wrong, but the general picture is right". Also, people have a short memory; if in December 2022 you prove that something published in October 2022 was false, no one really cares anymore, because the important thing is the December 2022 news which (supposedly) is true.
This is a great example where someone points out some important feature of the world, and half the people hearing them respond with "That's a dirty lie!" and the other half with "Well, of course, everyone knows that!"
I understand what you mean, but no. Most people don't get the subtleties here. Worse, many people who do think they get the subtleties actually don't. The fact that think they do, however, makes it even less likely that they ever will.
It's hard to make people understand a phenomena when they are confident in their misunderstanding.
It is very much one thing to witness a thing and think you understand what happened, and a whole other thing to be a person who makes an account of a thing that can be reviewed by others.
To say that people only come up with a portion of things they consume is an understatement.
Lol we have the same name! Read your post and was thinking “when did I write this?”
We are all some guy.
I like the cheeseburgers angle because it's a great analog to the decision to allow your confirmation bias and motivated reasoning to cause you to report misleading information
It feels good to lazily report whatever facts support your existing opinions. It feels *really* good. If you held a gun to the NYT reporter who said that most economists don't think school vouchers would improve test scores and said "Hi, what is the most accurate way to report this survey of economists, or else" they would probably succeed in including the fact that twice as many economists with a yes or no opinion said vouchers would help. And then the reporter would probably continue opposing vouchers for non test score reasons anyway
Similarly, if you went into a McDonalds and did the same with the request that the customers make an orderly path to the healthiest food within 20 minutes they would successfully all not eat four cheeseburgers that day. And then afterward they would continue to make food choices for reasons of physiological satisfaction and not think about whether they were eating healthy
In my opinion the most effective way to personally convince reporters to be more accurate would be to condescendingly talk about how their natural biases understandably led them to report on something in a misleading way. Appeal to their pride by letting them know you no longer have high expectations of them and they can't help it if they have made what is an obvious mistake to someone who is primarily motivated to not make those mistakes
A more likely solution is to stop thinking there's a button we can press on the media labelled "Willingly Be More Accurate". Develop systems of information with direct incentives for accuracy such as prediction markets
This is a whole lot of words to say “I define ‘lying by media’ exclusively as falsifying source material, while many/most other people include presentation of false claims derived from true statements to also be lying”
No, because I explained pretty clearly how I was defining it in the introduction to my previous post, and instead of saying that they disagreed with my definition, the commenters objected that my post was wrong.
That’s fair. It would have been better form for people to take issue with the, IMO, totally unreasonable definition. Maybe people just couldn’t grok that someone who usually writes about big concepts would be advancing an argument that hinges on a definition of “lying” that produces the dubious outcome “Alex Jones didn’t lie about Sandy Hopk”? I mean, we can define “up” such that apples fall upward from trees, but what’s the point?
Respectfully, if your interest was in how partial facts can be misrepresented to advance false conclusions, that would have been a more constructive thrust. I think you just hit the iceberg of people being very tired of being lied to, so explaining that the lies aren’t actually lies provoked... a response.
You express the dissenting point of view well.
Part of the original point, which IMO justified the very narrow definition of lying, was that “lying by motivated interpretation” is much harder to police than “lying by using incorrect facts.” There's a sliding scale of egregiousness.
Another way of looking at it is that media has evolved to lie in a way that they can't or won't be punished for.
If they could get away with blatant falsehoods they would but those are too easy to call out and could lead to legal trouble so you get the squishier form of lying wherein one can't legally *prove* it a lie but can still epistemically view it as a falsehood.
More than that, which context is relevant and what framing is best for conveying an accurate understanding of the world depends a great deal on your starting beliefs. If there's a news article about a spike in murders in Chicago over the last two years, is it relevant to mention how the timing corresponds to the BLM riots in 2020, or is that adding misleading context that diverts readers from an accurate understanding of the world? Well, that depends on your underlying beliefs about the cause of the spike in murders, right? Or maybe on your beliefs about what facts or ideas should be entertained in public and what facts or ideas should not be entertained in public.
SailerCorp media links every report of a spike in urban murders with a discussion of George Floyd and the BLM protests.
KendiCorp media links every report of a spike in urban murders with a discussion of the long history of racism in law enforcement and the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining.
Which one is providing a misleading framing, and which one a useful one? Depends on your starting worldview. Along with having different agenda, Sailer and Kendi have different understandings of how the world works, which makes different context seem relevant for understanding current events.
I'd go with whichever one's worldview doesn't cause it to do near 180's on an issue when covering different events.
If Kendicorp wants to tie *everything* to a history of racism I guess they can, but when there's an increase in Anti-Semetic attacks occurring as well and they then choose to switch explanations *away* from racism because:
A) They have less sympathy for the victims; and
B) It turns out the perps tend to be minorities themselves
And so they can't even keep their 'understanding of how the world works' *internally* consistent, then clearly it is proper to question the validity of their reporting across the board.
I'm not making this particular point up, either:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/antisemitic-incidents-hit-a-record-high-in-2021-whats-behind-the-rise-in-hate
So lets add onto the issue of lying, the media's consistent hypocrisy when it comes to proffering explanations, to the point where it *smacks* of bad faith.
SailerCorp media ... hmmhmmmmhhh ... interesting.
Judging from my bank account, unlike KendiCorp media, SailerCorp media must be a Not For Profit.
KendiCorp suggests that the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining got ~40% worse from 2019-2021. Also, covid!
SailerCorp suggests that the 44% increase in black homicide deaths and the 38% increase in black motor vehicle accident deaths from 2019 to 2021 is likely related to the "racial reckoning" that was declared by the American Establishment in the days following George Floyd's death when our elites concluded, virtually unanimously and with few dissenting voices being heard, that African-Americans suffered mostly from too much policing.
I don't think Scott's definition is unreasonable at all. In fact, I would say it is the only reasonable definition we could possibly use in any adversarial context. It is essentially the definition we use in our courts. No one has ever been charged with perjury for presenting only the facts most helpful to their case and presenting the opponents facts in the most negative light. That's literally the attorney's job. I'm astounded this group of really smart readers and commenters could have such difficulty following this. I am left thinking that the emotional response to some of these topics overrides some peoples' critical reading faculties and leaves them temporarily unable to break things down into individual claims and evaluate the truth of each one individually if they know ahead of time that they reject the conclusion. It's like the underlying core belief of many people is that an overall falsehood can't be built from a bunch of true constituent parts. This is just self-evidently false though. Of course you can build false narrative from a collection of curated true facts and doing so doesn't make the individual facts untrue. I keep thinking of this is the mirror image of Trump supporters arguing that he was building a larger true narrative out of a bunch of individual lies.
That would imply that people should be expected to read the media the way an attorney listens to his opponent: by condensing the message to its pure facts, carefully searching for any maliciously inserted narrative.
Journalists are held to a higher standard than attorneys: they should present the story behind the facts as they actually understand it while transparently explaining that there are multiple views on how the individual facts make up a story. If a journalist deliberately fails to do so, it is not unreasonable to colloquially say that he's lying. It would be more precise to say "he's construction a false narrative", but (as the commenters have argued) everybody knows that people mean exactly that when they say that "the media is lying".
I would say that as a consumer of media your job is to evaluate media sources just like you would evaluate the presentation of an attorney as a juror. You should understand that each side has a viewpoint and an agenda which they are pushing and will marshal all the favorable facts and implications they can for their own side and paint the opponent’s side in the most negative light possible. As a juror you should be able to generally treat factual statements as factual and weigh the overall narratives of both sides against each other. I don’t think it helps the discussion to confuse false statements of fact with misleading narratives.
While I agree that media consumers should be expected to pay attention to false narratives, I cannot agree that it is morally right for journalists to construct a narrative the same way as a attorney rightly does.
The relationship between the media and readers is like the relationship between drivers on public streets: One driver (the reader) has to be ready to react to a mistake by another driver (a media outlet). This does not mean that it is ok for the second driver to make mistakes.
A additional take would be to concede that media organisations are supposed to have a slight bias to encourage a helpful diversity of viewpoints. But if their bis becomes too strong, they create false narratives and act immorally.
Agreed, journalists should be trusted no more than others and even if they are, their editors and publishers certainly have a viewpoint they wish to project. While I may align more closely to the New York Times I would never consider the paper unbiased.
Most of the commenters are focused on the definition of lying. That there is a debate about "what is a lie" reinforces what I believe is the whole point of the article, A notion that there is an objective truth standard which can be applied to media is futile. Even more fraught is the notion that some body (as is proposed on occasion in my country) can sift through and police "misinformation", well good luck with that,
"That would imply that people should be expected to read the media the way an attorney listens to his opponent: by condensing the message to its pure facts, carefully searching for any maliciously inserted narrative."
[serious bearded man face] Yes.
I mean, that is indeed the only correct way to approach the media (stray too far in one direction and you'll believe their, yes, lies - but stray too far in another and you won't be able to discern and believe anything about the world, ever), and our epistemic ecosystem would be much healthier if more people internalized this. Journalists, empirically, are not in fact being held to a higher standard than attorneys, they are in fact expected to present the story behind the facts in a way consistent with beliefs and interests of their principals', peers and customers. This has always been true in practice, but nowadays the media go as far as outright discarding even the theory of impartiality.
Except that's not entirely true is it?
Subornation of perjury is definitely a thing, which is what happens when NPR publishes an impossible claim and then tacks on "NPR has been unable to verify these claims" (wasn't it journalistic malpractice to publish unverified stores at one point?)
And then there's the "known or should have known" or "reckless disregard for the truth" clauses.
Saying "it's not a lie if I didn't invent the lie, even though it's obviously a lie" get you to the point where you can just quote from The Protocols and say "what's the big deal?"
Hear, hear!
I still think the linguistic distinction Scott is drawing is useful, for a number of reasons. Other commenters do a good job re-summarizing Scott’s position, but imho, another reason is helping improve (if only slightly) the dialog among voices of the culture war.
Claiming an opposing viewpoint is constructed via lies is very likely to be the end of a discussion if the opposition is right in believing it’s not technically true.
Scott used the definition that was relevant to the point he was making about how any procedure for censoring lies is either mostly judgment calls or mostly useless.
And it's a definition that I encounter pretty often in ordinary life! It's definitely not the ONLY definition of "lying" that people use, but it's A definition that many people use pretty often. It's not like Scott is making this up out of the blue!
I think that by this standard *literally all statements about reality* are judgement calls. Some sources say the Earth is round, some sources say the Earth is flat, and who are we to make a judgement call about which one is correct? Unless you've personally launched into space to observe the Earth's curvature, all you're doing is gathering other sources and making judgement calls about their credibility.
So this seems like a really easy bullet to bite - yes, we are going to make judgement calls about which sources are truthful, and yes, we will not be 100% accurate in this process, but we will do it anyway because the alternative is a skepticism so radical that you can't even trust that the Earth is round.
I think there's been some sort of disconnect? Scott's whole point is that the media isn't usually going to make claims like "the earth is flat", they're going to make claims like "some sources say the earth is flat". Even if we can all agree that the earth is round, that doesn't answer the question of whether to censor people who say "some sources say the earth is flat", which is a true statement that is sometimes made by honest people (notice e.g. that you just made it).
I found Sott's definition perfectly clear and entirely reasonable.
an excellent demonstration of how difficult it is to think clearly and coldly about emotionally intense topics
or just how hard it is to be strictly "rational" at any time
Indeed, the greatest light from this thread, from Scott on down, may be that consistently thinking clearly is hard, and one thing not to do is to frame a somewhat contentious topic using a legalistic re-definition of words that people already think they know.
This whole topic would have been much less meta had Scott opted for a more rational framing; something like “even the most dishonest media rarely relies on objectively false data”. I’m sure that could be improved. With the best of intentions, Scott ended up asserting that any statement based on true source data cannot be a “lie”, and people reacted to that.
Scott's point is that false facts look like a bright line, such that you can sort facts into "true" and "false", outlaw people telling the false ones, and solve misinformation forever. But if the problem really is tendentious and misleading reporting, that is both a lot harder to decide and necessarily requires a process that's going to be highly vulnerable to corruption, due to being inherently subjective.
This is not a pro-lying argument, it's an anti-censorship argument.
That’s great, and I don’t disagree, and that is far more persuasive than Scott’s original piece. All I’m saying is that people, rightly or wrongly, get wound up about gaslighting. And coming at this from a “even the most blatant lies one sees in the media aren’t *really* lies” angle is necessarily going to be received as “nobody lied to you”
Okay, but the first line in Scott's original article was "With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point." I'm not sure how he could have been clearer that he's arguing that this presents difficulty for suppressing misinformation, not that he's trying to *exonerate Infowars.*
The very fact that so many people seem to be making this mistake suggests that Scott, in pointing to this phenomenon, is pointing to a conflation that is both very real and affects many among those who are smart and at least sympathetic to the rationalist framework.
Scott is pointing out that the problem with censorship and misinformation is that people conflate "false facts" type of lying (which is objective and relatively easy to then objectively counteract) with the "selective facts" type of lying, and in doing so, think that there can be some objective mechanism to do something like "remove misinformation" or "remove lying" from media. Cue a whole host of responses *which conflate both types of lying.*
I'm not sure if this is due to some artifact of the way Scott presented his case or if it really was a sort of "case in point" in the responses.
I think there's a very useful distinction to make between "misleading" and "lie" If everybody is using true facts to send a misleading message, then it's still possible for a savvy person to figure out what the truth probably is.
If they're outright falsifying material, it becomes much harder to do this.
I thought the thesis Scott laid out is pretty clear, and you either skimmed over it or willfully decided to misinterpret it because you have an emotional reaction to being told the media doesn't lie.
But it's a weak anti-censorship argument. If it were the true that detecting bad content were easy that would be a pro censorship argument. Good censorship arguments assume hard tradeoffs and edge cases and decides it's worth it even with false positives. If you start a slippery slope comparing Alex Jones sandy hook statements with bad polling then I'll just get off the slope after censoring Alex Jones.
Even if *you* will (a heroic assumption), the censorship system you built won't. None ever has.
I'm actually generally happy with moderation policies of tech companies (I don't always agree with them but I do think they do a reasonable job) and think both sides need to recognize that it's a hard task but while i support working the refs to fix bad edge cases I would resist calls to categorically reduce moderation. Your options aren't no censorship or Chinese levels of censorship.
I agree that censorship level is on a spectrum, but I hope you agree that it's dynamic over time. So your happiness is at best temporary. One day you'll be among the censored, and I predict you won't be equally pleased then. You don't even have to imagine how a Trump voter or a Russian speaker sees the current "moderation policies"; you can just recall yesterday's policies that banned depictions of gay love from all corners of polite society. Many people were also generally happy then, but that doesn't make it right.
Do you think there is more or less censorship than in the 90s? What I'm arguing is not that the things I think should be censored are censored and the topics I think shouldn't be censored aren't. Rather what I'm arguing is that the current process of having moderate censorship that evolves with societal understanding is preferable to either no moderation or china levels of censorship. I'd probably prefer 10% less moderation but not 50% less.
Who exactly is saying "the government is capable of 100% accurately separating fact from fiction?" Or "the government should outlaw all statements of falsehood and solve misinformation forever"?
This whole thing feels like a weakman - people are making fairly mild complaints like "Twitter has lots of obvious, Alex Jones-tier misinformation and I think they could do better at not spreading that around" and the response is "Oh, so you want the government to delete all lies from the internet at gunpoint? You think Twitter should become the Official Arbiter of Truth? Is that what you want?" No, we're saying that a private company should try to have good judgement about what sort of information it spreads, just like any other citizen or organization who shares things they hear about.
Is there an actual law about online misinformation that's being debated here? Do we have some actual lawyers who could weigh in on how to make such laws difficult to abuse? Or is the entirety of this argument just "nobody has 100% objective understanding of reality, therefore censorship is bad"?
Thank you.
People are saying "we want to run Alex Jones off the decent parts of the internet, because that guy just peddles pure misinformation and no decent person wants *that*". And they say that they're only going to do it against the evil Alex Jones types and it will be obvious who they are so we don't have to worry. But some of us are worried that the same people will then try to run e.g. Scott Alexander off the decent parts of the internet for his "pure misinformation".
At which point, the sort of person who wants it both ways, a nice pleasant internet experience with Scott Alexander but without Alex Jones anywhere in sight, start looking for some sort of "objective standard" that could be used to separate the two. And if you start trying to turn "misinformation" into a specific and objective standard, it's likely to be something like "stuff that can be proven to be factually untrue".
I think the number of people who A: genuinely want it both ways and C: share Scott's focus on the narrowly literal definition of "lie", is small enough that it's not going to matter to the outcome of that debate. But, at the margin, it is worth explaining to that crowd that even a "just don't literally lie" standard won't do what they expect it to.
The intent is to nuance the detail and debunk counterclaims, not to repeat what he already said in the first post... this post is for those who disagreed, and those wondering how to explain/debate it to someone who disagrees.
Perhaps some people are operating with a different conception of “lie” like “lead to believe falsehoods.” That’s the only reason I can think of to reject this, outside the “my opponents are evil liars” bias you propose.
I do have the impression that the objectors are inclined to label all media falsehoods as lies, but I can't believe they apply the same standard in their private lives. Possibly there's an unstated assumption that the media are omniscient?
If Albert comes to me and tell me "Bob is a rapist", refuse to elaborate and leave, and I start repeating to everyone I meet "Bob is a rapist" (maybe with a "Albert says" after), despite having made no effort to confirm the claim, nor having any indication that Albert was truthful, most people would consider me to be lying as well. They understand I'm not omniscient, they also understand that I'm a lying piece of shit for spreading baseless rumors.
I am increasingly under the suspicion that all value beliefs are downstream of factual beliefs; terminal values might not be all that different between people. It's like everyone wants a utopia, not a dystopia , (i.e. shared values) and simply disagree on what approach gets us there, and how close we can possibly get to it (i.e. different fact beliefs on like likelihood of various counterfactual scenarios following from each other)
Those two may not be as mutually exclusive as you might think https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me).
It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them.
I'm interested in learning more about this - do you remember / have links to any of them?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-clickbait-political-news-sites-us-election-trump
This is an article about the phenomenon, which doesn't link to any examples, which is exactly the sort of thing I've learned to try to verify. Do you remember / have links to any of the fake articles themselves?
I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jan/06/blog-posting/celebrity-praise-helpful-locals-are-fake-stories-c/
This is another article about the phenomenon, it links to a few example but it looks like they've all been taken down.
I also looked through politifact to find other counterexamples, and I found this:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/19/blog-posting/bogus-claims-about-gavin-newsom-being-executed-clo/
which points to this website with similar articles:
https://realrawnews.com/2022/12/nancy-pelosi-hanged-at-gitmo/
This definitely fits your definition of lying, although maybe it would be a stretch to call this website 'media' - where would you draw the line between 'a random person's blog' and 'media'?
Thank you, the Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo article is the first one in all these comments that I admit is definitely an example of the media lying. Good work!
(I wonder who this is aimed at, and whether anyone has ever believed it)
Sorry to be all over this thread. Super interesting discussion and fun comments section.
Wanted to echo that this was the original fake news phenomenon. And there were a lot of outlets created that gave readers the aesthetic impression that they were local news sites when they weren't. Even if the content was relatively truthful (uncertain) wasn't the intentionally misleading presentation a form of deception?
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/hundreds-of-hyperpartisan-sites-are-masquerading-as-local-news-this-map-shows-if-theres-one-near-you/
This appears to be a parody site.
https://realrawnews.com/about-us/
Thinking about it more, the difference between this and something like Infowars (or even the NYT) is probably less to do with credibility/prestige and more to do with size. Infowars has, afaik, a few dozen employees, so any article written would probably involve multiple people; based on the article you linked below realrawnews seems to be written by a single person. Maybe this argument more generally is "Groups of people can't coordinate to knowingly lie about something" - I can't think of any counterexamples off the top of my head, but maybe other people can think of some.
I think you'd want to be precise about who "the media" is - the sites involved in the original fake news phenomenon were an extension of those basically content-free SEO spam pages that pollute your Google search results sometimes. They would use the stylistic conventions of local news websites of the time, and they would get their traffic by having "articles" go viral on social media (or sometimes appearing in the targeted ads on actual publications' articles). But they were basically internet chaff - it's not like you would find any journalists saying they had worked there, or people in their putative markets saying they subscribe or regularly visit.
> This is another article about the phenomenon, it links to a few example but it looks like they've all been taken down.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has some of the articles archived (e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20160720014154/http://channel18news.com/bangor-maine/lady-gaga-explains-why-shes-moving-to-bangor-maine). Note that the most recent snapshots of those articles are redirects to the home page, so you need to look for older snapshots.
The ur-example (in my mind at least):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Guardian
If you want an explicit example of falsehoods, this one links to some actual tweets: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-russia-dominates-your-twitter-feed-to-promote-lies-and-trump-too
I didn't have this to hand, just got it from a bit of clicking around on the IRA. I didn't think it was controversial that Russia was engaging in an aggressive disinformation/psy-ops campaign around the 2016 election (the controversy was just about whether Trump was colluding with them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/12/17/18144523/russia-senate-report-african-american-ira-clinton-instagram
My old employer BuzzFeed did an exposé on a news agency which ran (sometimes) literally made up stories, though even then they were more commonly embellished https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/central-european-news we were sued for libel but won the case
I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes.
I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money.
I found this Colbert clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m41TVTLg0CM
And this article in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/577033/fake-news-fairytale/
I'm not sure whether this is what you're looking for, but there were some articles about fake news factories cranking out fictional stories purely for the money, like https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/, with links to a couple more.
The most famous 2016 example of fake news (before Trump hijacked the phrase) was "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President". I don't know if this counts as "the media" lying because it was a hoax website masquerading as a news site ("WTOE 5 News") that has since been shut down. But the story spread like wildfire on Facebook:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/the-strangest-fake-news-empire
There was a Planet Money podcast about this type of fake news: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episode-739-finding-the-fake-news-king
I found it quite interesting. I had forgotten that's what "fake news" used to mean.
I'm with you on the general point but I think you're being too charitable to InfoWars (and maybe others) in at least some examples.
Take the InfoWars birth certificate one: in addition to all the claims about layers and so on, it says "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax". That is a factual claim which is false. They offer support for that claim which isn't actually convincing, and the support they offer happens to be true but out of context, and I'm with you on calling the supporting evidence "not lies". But "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax" is in fact flatly false, and is asserted by the article itself, not just "someone said".
Disagree. They're stating their conclusion and the evidence that led to their conclusion. Their conclusion is wrong, but not a lie or "them making things up", just an incorrect inference.
If we are using the technical definition of "lie" whereby one must be making a false claim while knowing it is false, rather than making a false claim with reckless disregard for the truth, sure. But I think the second sense is the one people usually hold, and moreover most of the media does avoid lying in the second sense. InfoWars is genuinely unusual in that it does not. You can use the more usual definition of "lie" and still have your thesis hold for the media as a whole, just not for InfoWars in particular.
Using your definition we couldn't call anything a lie if there is any true fact offered in support of that claim. I don't think that's the usual definition.
Using your definition, it sounds like you're accusing me of lying in this post and making up my facts, since you believe my conclusion is false (even if I was well-intentioned). See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
Why would you want to expand the definition of "lie" so big that it includes unintentional errors in reasoning?
Do you see a distinction between making a definitive statement that is false (even if could have been arrived at honestly) vs. making a statement that is true but misleading? Since it seems to me that many of the InfoWars examples are the former while the mainstream media examples are the latter.
I think our disagreement is about definitions, not about facts in the world. And disagreements about definitions can't be lies (by definition).
But also, I don't think you've made a claim with reckless disregard for the truth, whereas I think InfoWars did. I am not at all convinced that InfoWars had a sincere belief that the birth certificate in question was a forgery. I think it is much more likely that they simply didn't care to know the truth of the matter. And I think it's reasonable to say that when someone makes it a false claim without caring whether or not it's true, that's a lie. This is the standard used for defamation in the US ("reckless disregard for the truth" is stock legal phrase), and defamation is usually understood to mean "lying about someone in a harmful way", so I think this is a pretty normal standard.
I'm not trying to expand the definition to unintentional errors in reasoning. I'm trying to use the to-me preexisting definition of "making a false claim without caring whether it's true".
I worry that you are using "reckless disregard for the truth" as what I described as "a be dumb and evil gear". I'm not super-invested in the claim that Infowars writers in particular believe their own conspiracy theories (though it seems plausible! Some people believe them! Why wouldn't those be the people who end up working at Infowars!), but I worry that everyone thinks their opponents have "reckless disregard for the truth", and that leaving that loophole means everyone gets to elide the difference between "my opponent is expressing an opinion" and "my opponent is literally lying".
My point here is that this isn't a loophole which would generalize beyond InfoWars, because everyone from the NYT to Fox News basically manages to avoid making false statements of fact in the first place - as you observe, they are careful to phrase things as "according to X" or to suggest a conclusion without actually asserting it. It's really only InfoWars in particular that actually outright makes false statements of fact. They are genuinely doing something different than the NYT or Fox here. Your thesis still holds when using my definition for the rest of the media except InfoWars.
And I note that the claim "InfoWars sincerely believes their false claims [and therefore is not lying by Scott's definition]" requires exactly the same level of insight into their mental state as "InfoWars makes false claims with reckless disregard for the truth [and therefore is lying by my definition]". So I don't see why we should believe they are definitely not lying (by your definition) if we aren't willing to speculate about their mental state. And if we are willing, I think evidence is in favor of "reckless disregard" here.
I don't think that any reasonable person would suggest you are reckless, whereas Infowars has a long history of recklessness. Not every unintentional error is reckless, but some of them certainly are.
I think that recklessness has some overlap with falling to attempt to validate sources or consider other explanations: again, not what you're doing here IMO.
I agree with most of the article. But I think there are two possible interpretations of "lying" (roughly, making false statements vs making intentionally false statements) and your original article makes it sound like you're saying the media rarely makes statements that are literally false.
> Still, on the most nitpicky level, as far as I can tell the article doesn’t say a lot which is literally false.
> But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts.
InfoWars probably honestly believed Obama's birth certificate was a hoax. If InfoWars instead said "we *uncovered evidence* that the new birth certificate is a hoax", I could see that as a potentially true statement. But while "New Obama birth certificate is a hoax" may be their honest opinion, it's also a false fact.
So maybe it's worth clarifying that when reporters do report false fact, it's an honest but mistaken belief (or at least plausibly so).
This also leads into a rather messy philosophical question on whether anything can be proved a lie, since we can't prove anything in the physical world with 100% certainty and we can't know someone's internal beliefs. Any statement is possibly true with enough conspiratorial thinking and the reporter could honestly believe it.
So if we're talking about how this applies to fact checking, we need some threshold at which we can reasonably say a claim is false, and I think "Obama's birth certificate is a forgery" meets that threshold. At least as much as any statement in the news can.
I strongly disagree that the distinction being drawn is between "known false" and "reckless disregard". The distinction being drawn is between "I claim to directly know this" and "this is an inference I am drawing from facts that you also know".
If they had said "based on the evidence and reasoning outlined in this article, I submit that this document is a shoddily contrived hoax," then that would be a true statement. If it's fairly obvious that's what they meant, then most impartial observers are not going to call them liars just because they worded it imprecisely.
(You may or may not consider this relevant, but that's also a legal standard for defamation. Conclusions based on true disclosed facts cannot count as defamation, even if the conclusions are both false and unreasonable.)
I did a double-take at the InfoWars one too. The difference between "asserting an obviously incorrect conclusion, drawn from specious, easily explicable evidence, to further ulterior motives" and "making something up" seems so vanishingly small as to be useless. Indeed, it seems like the only way something could truly be classified as a lie under this rubric is if one could know both a) the state of the purported liar's knowledge and b) their intent, which is of course impossible, so what's the point of having the concept of a lie at all? Wouldn't everyone accused of being a liar simply be able to say "that's what I believed" and, the accuser being unable to prove them wrong on that point, end the conversation?
I think all of "obviously", "easily explicable", and "to further ulterior motives" are you doing the "they're just being dumb and evil!" thing here. These things obviously aren't obvious to the people who get them wrong, or easily explicable to the people who fail to explain them.
And I think that's my point - for just about every incorrect statement one can make, there will be some group of people to whom it rings true. If every attempt to point out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or ulterior motives in the original statement can be dismissed as an ad hominem attack by *someone*, then there's no such thing as a lie, is there? Or at least, nothing that everyone can agree is a lie. Which seems pretty fundamental to the usefulness of lies as a concept, them being about truth and all.
I guess the larger point is that this pair of articles seems less about expanding our understanding about how the media operates, why framing matters, what the responsibilities of journalists and editors are, etc - all of which are very topical and interesting! - and more about contracting the definition of a lie such that practically no one can be said to be doing it.
If we restrict ourselves to controversial examples, it shouldn't be surprising that it's difficult to get consensus on what's a lie. If it were easy then they wouldn't be controversial.
But there are other examples where lying becomes sufficiently obvious and it's not controversial anymore. (Theranos is one example.)
> there's no such thing as a lie, is there?
Under Scott’s definition, there still is such a thing.
> and more about contracting the definition of a lie such that practically no one can be said to be doing it.
… and so yes, that’s exactly the point. I think this contraction is *useful* though. If it were more common that the media told outright lies, the national discussion regarding what media should do better would be rightfully simple: the media should stop lying.
As Scott points out though, it’s not that simple. The media is doing something more subtle (but admittedly just as bad), and so how we want the media to change is less straightforward. With the confusion around the definition of lying, the discussion about what the media should do differently too often simply stops at “the media should stop lying.”
But the context of this post is censorship.
How do we define a lie in terms of censorship so that we always get Infowars and don't get the NYT?
Infowars is lying in a casual sense of the term, I agree. But they are doing the same kind of thing as the NYT—they just do it more egregiously. But "more egregiously" is a value statement, based upon my analysis of the evidence, and therefore it's impossible to set it down in a law.
Well, the obvious solution to that very specific presentation of the problem is to let the NYT define what a lie is.
My point here is that "false statements made with reckless disregard for the truth" applies basically only to InfoWars. As Scott is pointing out, NYT and Fox and so on manage to avoid making false statements in the first place, by careful use of weasel words, and so cannot be lying according to this definition.
Who exactly is being censored here? Alex Jones and the NYT are both still on the air. One is considered more trustworthy by the general public and is consequently far more likely to get shared by other private citizens, but that's just "the marketplace of ideas" in action. Alex Jones only faced state punishment for a very specific lie - his claims that nobody died in Sandy Hook, and that the parents were crisis actors (resulting in concrete damages from the parents getting harassed).
"Reckless disregard for the truth" may be a judgement call, but it's a call that the legal system has a lot of practice making and it appears to reliably hit Infowars and not the NYT. Actually, it reliably passes both Infowars and the NYT most of the time and only rarely hits Infowars when they do something truly egregious.
I’ve always thought that the definition of “lie”requires intent. If my wife asks me if I cheated on her, and I say “no” (but actually did), then I am lying. If I get caught, then it is proven.
The use of “lie” in the media context seems to me like hyperbole. One side in the media war uses bad faith to accuse the other of lying, when they have drawn conclusions of such without evidence of mindset.
The best evidence of this to me is all the accusations that Trump lied to his followers that the election is stolen. I’ve seen no objective evidence for asserting that is a lie. When I ask people, they say that the AJ told him, or something like that. I think there is lots of evidence that Trump is somewhat stubborn in his beliefs and gravitates to some sources over others.
So, are these people lying when they say Trump lied? Probably not, as they may be having trouble conceiving that someone could believe that it is true that the election was stolen based on the information that they have read. They likely honestly believe he tried to dupe his followers. Maybe he did, but there is no evidence I’ve seen of it.
Trump was presented with true information and false information. He chose to repeat the false information. We could have a debate as to whether he was mentally incapable of assessing evidence or whether he intentionally lied. The defense "he is incapable of separating fact from fiction and has extreme confirmation bias" is impossible to disprove and has no detectable behavioral differences from "he's a pathological liar" so I don't know why you want to make that distinction.
The point is that it is really complicated to discern what is "true" and what is "false". Many things exist in a grey area. Personally, I tend to think in terms of likelihood that something is true to mitigate this. But much this likelihood is still fed by a priori beliefs and the bias that stems from them.
In Trump's world, he's been dealing with dirty trick (pee tape dossier) after dirty trick (suppression of the Hunter laptop) and has had numerous on the left calling him a Nazi. It would be reasonable to assume that if people think your a Nazi, they are probably willing to cheat to retain power. And that feeds into his bias and impacts what he believes is true and what isn't.
In Biden's world, he says that the event that made him want to seek office was when Trump called neo-Nazis "fine people". Any objective viewing of Trump's post-Charlottesville remarks indicate that this didn't happen. Was Biden lying? Maybe, but like Trump I give him the benefit of the doubt as in his a priori beliefs Trump is likely associated with white supremacy.
Two sides of the same coin. I want words to mean things. The word "lying" implies intent. It implies deceit. It is akin to fraud. By calling things lies that aren't proven to be so, we use a mix of hyperbole and mind reading to ascribe an ethical failing that otherwise wouldn't exist. It is dangerous as it turns normal cognitive functions into something malicious.
Even people with frequent confirmation bias, shouldn't be ascribed with an ethical failing (pathological liar). It makes disagreements toxic and throws up a barrier that makes it harder to truly understand people that you disagree with.
It takes a lot of work to challenge your bias and develop systems to mitigate them. As I didn't see evidence during the Trump era that someone as intelligent, thoughtful & well-schooled as Rachel Maddow was putting in that hard work - how can I expect better from Trump?
The problem is that you giving everyone the benefit of the doubt means that those with ill intent can take advantage of your forgiving nature very easily. You are bending over so far backwards to ascribe reasonable motives to Trump that you have defined the word "lying" out of existence. Nothing could possibly rise to the level of lying because no one can ever prove mal-intent.
Trump *is* a pathological liar. I can understand people I disagree with. Many people who have similar political beliefs to Trump have those beliefs honestly. Trump is not one of those people. He has committed financial fraud after financial fraud. He has lied directly to his supporters in order to scam them out of their money over and over. And he has told untold numbers of political lies from the banal (largest inauguration crowd ever) to the insidious (election fraud). Sure you can tell me that you ascribe good intentions to him all you want. But either he is a malicious liar or he is so disconnected from reality as to be psychotic. And his ability to function passably in society indicates to me that he is not psychotic.
As long as well-intentioned people like you and Scott obfuscate and dither about separating between people who are straight up lying and people who are telling half-truths, the people who are straight-up lying will be rewarded for their brazenness and others will copy their behavior.
Again, your insistence on intent when you put such an unreasonably high bar on the standard of proof that you expect, means that you have defined lying so narrowly as to be a contentless category. Or at the very least a category that no one can use without someone else claiming that intent was lacking in bad faith.
After listening to a bunch of episodes of the Breakdown podcast on the Trump grand-jury thing, I changed my mind from thinking he probably believed he was defrauded out of the presidency to thinking the opposite. So that might work for you too if you're interested in changing your mind on the matter.
A definition of lying that charitable to the person making the statement seems like it would prevent us from concluding nearly any written claim with at least some apparent support is a lie. If you mean the point of the article in this way, it seems to me to be likely true but somewhat unsurprising as a claim about the media. "We probably can't prove with high certainty that someone was lying unless they admit it" or something of that form.
Can you give an example of a piece of written work that you believe crosses the boundary into deliberate lying?
How is "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax" not a statement of fact?
Reposted from downthread:
When I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that.
If later it turned out it *was* a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been *lying* when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning).
Jones states his own facts and the conclusion he infers from them. If his conclusion is wrong, the correct term for this wrongness is "failed inference", not "lying".
I hope we can all agree that the NYT wouldn't draw such big conclusions from such thin findings. The InfoWars birth certificate article doesn't even really seem internally certain about how PDF layers work.
The critique I'm making now falls into the broader "InfoWars is much more egregious in its infractions than the NYT category." But I do think it reveals the slippery line between knowing lies and what one might call "lies of egregious sloppiness." If some serious part of a person knows that they haven't proved what they're claiming but they (or their bosses) insist on claiming that you have proved it, isn't that a form of lying?
A lot of this boils down to good intent. I think the NYT is mostly claiming to have proved things when they believe they have and InfoWars isn't as worried about that kind of thing.
There's an argument that much of media is underlings doing the hard work of telling truths in the body of the piece so their bosses can say whatever they want in the headlines.
But the underlings are much more serious and honest at the NYT and the bosses at the NYT are less ridiculous in their headline assertions relative to what the body of the piece says.
Reading through this thread, I honestly think my main disagreement with you is that I don't think most InfoWars writers believe their own bullshit but I think the NYT writers mostly do.
That's fair. I'm very interested in the question of whether Infowars writers believe their own bullshit, not too certain either way, and will hopefully write a post soliciting thoughts on that in the future.
I agree that NYT is better than Infowars. As I said in the post:
"Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars, or anything like that. My goal is to make the very specific point that a wide variety of media sources, from NYT to Infowars, follow a similar pattern of very rarely lying explicitly or making things up, regardless of whether or not their articles are deceptive."
I think it is useful to distinguish between lies and egregious sloppiness, two very different categories that need different responses, and that calling the latter "lies of egregious sloppiness" just confuses the situation.
I also think there's a third category, something like "I know this broader point is true, the most important thing is to convince people that this broader point is true, so I don't need to worry too much about the veracity of the specific arguments I'm using", which is common both at the NYT and the Infowars grade, and which I sometimes catch myself doing too. Of course, people can use this excuse whether or not the thing they know to be true is actually true.
I think if you know that your specific argument is *wildly* insufficient to prove your headline and lead then that is a form of media deception. As I wrote, headlines and leads are what people consume and a lot of media exists to propagate them and the stories just justify them. So a disjunct between the headline and the body is fairly serious.
I guess we can quibble about whether it's worth contorting lying to cover that sin or not. Maybe we should just move away from the word lying altogether. All I care about showing is that InfoWars deceives people in unethical ways and the NYT, to the extent it deceives people, does so fairly innocently or from a place of non-malicious hubris.
But I think they are making things up. They are making explicit *false* claims about the *meaning* of artifacts in digital representations. So, in this case, I think you are also factually incorrect, and after it has been pointed out to you I would expect you to update your claim :-)
Are there examples where the NYT has drawn broad important conclusions from very thin evidence of this kind?
Coinbase did a racism. Scott Alexander is a Nazi. Cambridge analytica gave Trump the election. SBF really wasn’t that bad. Etc
Sicknick was muirdered.
Considering the NYT decided that Sicknick was murdered even though the Capitol Police said the contrary, we most certainly can not agree that the NYT won't "draw such big conclusions from such thin findings."
Your definition of a lie here is far narrower than what most people take the word to mean, and I think so narrow as to be basically useless: a reporter would not only have to say something false, but also say that they know it's false - otherwise how can we possibly know that the reporter didn't believe it? If your claim is that the media doesn't do that, then I don't think anyone disagreed in the first place.
I don't think this confusion is just from people misreading you, either. In your original post, you seem mostly interested in distinguishing literally-false things from true-but-only-technically things, *not* false things that the reporter believed from false things that they didn't:
"But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context."
If this is the distinction you want to make, then "Obama birth certificate is a hoax" falls on the "false facts" side of the line. If your point is even broader - that we can't even evaluate the truth value of statements like this - then your conclusion surely must be that as long as someone could possibly believe something, it can't count as a lie, a definition you can't possibly expect people to have agreed with.
When Infowars declares that Obama's birth certificate is a hoax, they're lying by claiming to have definitive evidence of something that is false when they don't. The title of that article is pretty clearly a lie. I think you're right about most of the other cases, but this one is different.
If stating an incorrect conclusion that's arrived at by inference isn't lying, then surely that entails that lying is impossible, because all facts claims are based on an inference from evidence. (Unless you are making statements about your own qualia). I realise that may seem a pedantic distinction, but my point is that your distinction between a conclusion and a fact seems difficult to sustain systematically
Really? You don't think people lie all the time in direct and obvious ways that have absolutely dick to do with mistaken inference?
"Where were you?" "Uh...out with the guys"
"Um...sure, I bought it here. I just can't find the receipt. Can I still return it?"
"Did you know she was going to be here?" "No! Absolutely not! Total surprise!"
"Sorry I'm late. Um...the car wouldn't start for the longest time, I better get it checked."
"Yeah, I'm not going to make it in today. Not feeling well, I think I might have a fever."
You seem to say they actually decided to write that the birth certificate was fake *because* they inferred it from the artifacts. The alternative theory is that they wanted to lie that the birth certificate was fake, and they went out of their way to find some evidence, however flimsy, to justify it. And indeed, no matter what you want to lie, you can find some true facts you can claim you infer it from. It's quite plausible that this is what infowars often does, though it's always going to be a judgment call.
I suspect that they started out *believing* that the birth certificate was fake, and then they went out of their way to find confirmatory evidence, however flimsy.
Okay, so, suppose I get someone to utter the sentence "Scott Alexander is a terrorist." Then I can not lie by reporting that "Someone said that Scott Alexander is a terrorist." And by your lights, it's not even a lie if I then draw the conclusion in the post that Scott Alexander is a terrorist, because it's an incorrect inference, rather than just making things up? I've condensed this down to the smallest possible version where it isn't even credible that I am actually making the inference, but there is a version where my employer asks someone else to say the thing, then I write the article and now you, with your commitment to giving so much charity that you can't tell a rigged game when you see it, say "ah, this carnival operation isn't cheating me, the person who called me a terrorist in print isn't lying, just reasoning poorly. I will debate them about this in the marketplace of ideas!"? That's your pitch?
amen
> Then I can not lie by reporting that "Someone said that Scott Alexander is a terrorist."
The traditional way to say this is: "Scott Alexander is a suspected terrorist". (Literally true, if at least one person suspects him.)
If they did in fact draw that inference, then you're right, but that's the part where you may be being too charitable. It is possible that the writer knew the birth certicate to be genuine, but wrote an article saying it was a hoax because that was the brief, and came up with some contrived rationale to justify that. If so, that would be a lie.
> I don’t know why there’s the white border around stuff, I would guess “some kind of image processing something something”...
Yes, that often happens with a Sharpen filter. Sometimes scanners even do this sort of thing automatically.
What is a Sharpen filter, and why would you use it on a birth certificate?
SurgeStick likely means an unsharpen mask. It’s a filter (in the sense of a convolutional kernel) that’s applied to images to increase local contrast. You can try it out yourself with a phone camera and it’s built in image processing suite, e.g. take a picture or text and drag the sharpen slider to the right.
Alternatively here’s a paper that explains the phenomenon and attempts to adress it — I’m on mobile atm so there may be more pertinent papers:
https://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/imager/tr/2012/Countershading/EG.2012-Countershading.pdf
As always, I should have just picked Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking?wprov=sfti1
Simple image processing operation that increases the contrast on boundaries. Roughly, it involves sliding a (convolution) mask over the image and for every pixel saying "set this to a value that's *further away* from its surroundings." Doesn't affect the black writing, because it's already as black as it gets, but the green paper gets moved "away from black" - ie. towards white.
You *could* maybe get something similar from copy-and-paste, but only if you mess up the selection on the document you're copying from. Avoiding this is as easy as clicking "color to alpha" instead of just using the selection wand. And with naive editing like that, you'd expect a sharper division between the copypasted pixels and the green surroundings. The blurry white corona says "sharpen filter."
Great explanation. The damning part of it is that this phenomenon is probably known to pretty much anyone who’s ever done any image processing, so imho these “experts“ 100% of the time should have known how to interpret it.
Edit: fixed quotation marks
Entirely unrelated, but the tendency of people to use “‚‚” as an opening quote irrationally enrages me. Now that I've mostly recovered from that rage, I'm wondering about its origin.
Quote marks work that way in German. See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-languages/
So sorry, I usually care a lot about typography and proper use of punctuation, too. (My personal pet peeve is “-“ vs “–“ vs “—“.)
What you’re seeing is the result of iOS’ autocorrect when typing on a German keyboard. I no longer switch keyboard languages every time because the keyboards have gotten good at accepting words from different languages than they’re set to. :/
This isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors?
They don't care about the technical details. Minor details like the difference between a rifle and a handgun don't matter.
At what point does the sharpen filter happen? Was it automatic in scanning the physical birth certificate into a digital file, or did someone do post-processing on it to make it look better?
It often happens multiple times in the image chain. The scanner almost certainly sharpened, and if the image was saved lossily, it was likely sharpened again. Possibly multiple times.
When "should" it happen? Once, just before the image is being displayed or printed, so you know how much sharpening you need/can get away with, but this ideal is rare.
An extra fun thing: other image processing (in this case, compression) done automatically by some photocopiers was bad enough to change the numbers in documents. As you might imagine, this could screw up any legal document involving numbers.
See, eg.:
https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_means_dodgy_numbers_and_dangerous_designs/
More generally, this kind of artifact is called ringing, and is one of the two main kinds of artifact you trade off against when processing any analog-ish signal. To oversimplify: go too sharp and you get frequency components that weren't in the original signal (ringing, aliasing); go too blunt and you lose frequency components that actually were in the original (blurring). The only way to completely avoid both requires you to know the highest frequency that's "really in" the data and sample at least twice that frequency. With extremely sharp boundaries, like those you find in printed documents, this requires an impractically high sample rate. Humans expect text documents to have clear boundaries between background and foreground, and blurry text is a pain to read, so the scanning software was probably tuned toward ringing by intentional design. And, as other commenters have said, if the background had been white (like in typical documents), a lot of the ringing would have been truncated out of the signal...
I used to work on scanner firmware, and our default was to run image segmentation, then apply a sharpening filter to text and a smoothing filter to halftone patterns. This was done by a CPU and ASIC in the scanner itself. Some of this could be turned off in advanced settings, but no scan is truly unprocessed. Raw/unprocessed scans look pretty terrible. But it can definitely produce artifacts, especially for text on an uneven background like the birth certificate.
It’s a way of making a (usually digital) image appear sharper. Extremely widely used in photography, to compensate for a lack of resolution or whatever. The user is often not aware of it unless they go looking. I would not be surprised if it also happens in scanners.
Why the white halo? Depends on the sharpening algorithm, but one of the oldest (and still good) is an ‘Unsharp mask’, where you copy the image, blur it a little, negate the brightness, then superimpose on the original. If you start off with a slightly blurred image of a black link on a grey background, then this will ‘cancel out’ some of the blurring. But if you get the intensity slightly too high, or the radius slightly too large, then you get this kind of white halo.
Not saying this is necessarily what happened here, but not implausible to me.
It most likely has something to do with the compression algorithm used by the Xerox brand scanning machines, here's German computer scientist David Kriesel talking about it
https://youtu.be/c0O6UXrOZJo
Exactly this, the birth certificate artifacts were due to a faulty character replacement algorithm (JBig2 compression) in Xerox Workstation Scanners, which was discovered by a german computer scientist in 2013.
His name is David Kriesel and here is his original blog post from 2013 on this Xerox Bug:
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
And eventually even popular US-Media reported it. He recounts that once he gave his cellphone number to one single US-Journalists (and asked for it not to be distributed), half a day later apparently everyone and their mother had it and he was flooded calls all day. And also all night, because what even are time zones.
ABCnews on it:
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/xerox-machines-change-documents-scanning/story?id=19895331
CNBC on it:
https://www.cnbc.com/id/100945451
It is an interesting point of human psychology that even people deliberately setting out to deceive don't lie.
But people do explicitly lie all the time. News media has different concerns than do individuals.
Do they?
My impression is that people try lots of delusional and deceptive tactics to avoid actually lying.
Both of those things can be true. I think people often try to tell stories that are as close to the truth as possible in an attempt to convince themselves that they aren't really lying. People will also lie to themselves first in order to tell lies to others that they believe are true. People who lie in court usually try to convince themselves they are actually telling the truth. I call that "method lying".
But I'd say a high percentage of people also tell outright and bald-faced lies all the time. Sometimes people lie for very good reasons. Not everything is everyone's business. If someone asks an impudent question, they don't necessarily deserve an honest answer. I happily lie to people I don't wish to be honest with. Hope I'm not the only one...
You are :)
I think it’s just a result of kids telling lies when they’re young and learning how easy it is to get called out on them and how mortifying it can feel to have them weigh on you.
Eventually you learn other approaches that are much less vulnerable and much less stressful and even normalise them to the extent you can deceive yourself with these approaches to deception.
> I was surprised to see that all their counterexamples seemed, to me, like the media signal-boosting true facts in a misleading way without making anything up at all. Clearly there’s some kind of disconnect here!
I think the disconnect is simple enough. It closely tracks the distinction between high and low decouplers. To wit, low decouplers reject the very distinction that Scott is making. To them, highly deceptive stories *just are* lying. They don't assign much weight to Scott's distinction between "making up facts" and presenting a badly deceptive narrative.
This could be because of cognitive-emotional deficits on the part of low decouplers. BUT it could also be because they are employing a mental model of the journalists producing the stories and the social institutions in which those journalists work, according to which Scott's distinction doesn't matter much.
FWIW: I strongly agree with Scott's ultimate point that there exists no clear and simple definition of "misinformation" and therefore no primitive action of "banning misinformation." I'm less supportive of the argument he uses to get there.
Yeah, "X is not the name for the kind of bad thing Y is" is very prone to scissoring high decouplers from high couplers, especially when presented a very highly-decoupled way.
Thanks for pointing me towards the coupling/decoupling thing (e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms), hadn't heard of it before.
When someone knows something to be true and seeks to hide it by emphasizing other things, I would consider that a lie. Sure, its a different kind of lie using avoidance to deceive, but still deceived. Its only a technicality the individual statements are true while the message is not.
"Among other common lies, we have the silent lie—the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all."
https://genius.com/Mark-twain-on-the-decay-of-the-art-of-lying-annotated
I'm not at all convinced that most of the people writing these articles believed they were false. Certainly there are many people who genuinely believe each of these conspiracy theories - why wouldn't conspiracy newspapers hire them as journalists and reporters?
I also think that I defined my terms very clearly at the beginning of this and the last post, and that it's important to be able to distinguish between things-that-are-explicitly-false and things-that-indirectly-deceive. It's hardly an objection to note that if you wanted to be vague and misleading, you could use the same term to describe both!
I haven't attempted a systematic analysis, but my impression is that over the last few years a lot of serious people, including many in the media, have started using the term "lie" to mean any falsehood or misleading statement they think is really bad, whether or not they know it was intended to mislead. Consequently we don't have a word that means what "lie" used to mean. Maybe we should start referring to intentional lies?
"Intentional lies" would still include "intentionally reporting true facts out of context" though, which is still much broader than Scott's narrow definition.
I think this runs into the same problem as a dishonest business wanting to hire dishonest employees: employees come as a whole package, and dishonest employees are as likely to screw you as your customers. So you have to hire honest employees and disguise the scam nature of your business from them.
If you're running a conspiracy newspaper, you would ideally like employees who believed the conspiracy, but for other reasons you have to have employees grounded in reality.
I think an unexplored media environment where this heuristic might also hold is in celebrity magazines. In the past I've parroted sentiments along the lines of "Celebrity magazines just make up shitty gossip" despite never actually reading them myself. In all likelihood celebrity magazine journalists probably play the deference game to unreliable sources that you sketched out; it seems pretty unlikely that their editors would be telling them "Yeah just make up as much drama as you can."
I didn't disagree with the original, per se. I just fundamentally don't think it's a useful exercise to draw a bright line between "lying" and "being flagrantly deceptive". I agree with the general point that disinformation is difficult or impossible to objectively define. But I don't think that, say, a news outlet repeating a flagrant lie told by an "expert source" uncritically is distinct from "lying" in any way that is important to me.
I gave a specific example of when it was important (people saying censorship is easy because we'll just censor outright lies and that will cure misinformation).
I guess maybe the disconnect here for me is that I rarely see things framed in those terms. The people I encounter who are in favor of censoring their opposition rarely make such distinctions. Maybe your online acquaintance circle is just higher quality than mine, I don't know.
The real place it becomes framed in those terms is the various efforts to advance Anti-disinformation as an act of legislation, where all these concepts have to be implemented in legal language.
I think I can fully agree to the final conclusion: Most people are just trying to reason under uncertainty. And failing, terribly.
See I really do disagree about this. I don't think a lot of journalist really are trying to reason. I am actually serious about this. I think for many of them getting across political points has become a more primary directive than reasoning out and conveying the truth.
That may be the case and yet, it is not the same as simply lying. I really agree to this too: https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1609037309726392324/photo/1
And even healthcare workers can be bad at interpreting certain data. We all have our biases.
See I think when you are recklessly disregarding or distorting the truth, that simply is a form of lying. Full stop.
If I am an arsonist murderer and firefighters run up to the building and ask me if there was anyone inside and I say "no", because I am stabbed all the people to death before the fire started, I did not "tell the truth".
I made a true statement, but in the broader context or our communication I lied.
Truth and falsity is a feature of individual statements, lying is about communication and context matters.
In the context of a news article stringing together 12 of 200 possible facts all from a source you know is questionable in order to deceive your audience is lying.
I don't like the word recklessly here because that's a way to accuse your opponent without substance. The whole pandemic discourse has been tragic with social networks banning opposing views with the pretext that they are endangering lives.
Trump said something about hydroxychloroquine and he was immediately accused of killing people. It's true, this medicine was not found to be effective but banning opposing views was not a solution. When people are failing in their interpretations, we just need to provide proper interpretations with detailed reasoning of every step and make effort to popularise these explanations instead of fighting so much with antivax and so on. It is much harder than simply banning people though. Only in cases of clear fraud they should be banned or when legally not allowed (like giving medical advice by non-professional).
In the case with hydroxychloroquine it turned out that the only case when a person died from overdosing it, was an intentional poisoning by a spouse and not self administered.
The word recklessly is charitable. The appropriate word in a lot of contexts is deviously.
The case in point is the new scare about Chinese travellers bringing new covid variants to Europe and the US.
ECDC already announced that the measures to requiring negative covid test travellers from China are not rational (the new variants are already spread around and now we have immunity from vaccinations and previous infections) and should not be introduced. And yet, Italy, Spain, the UK and US have already implemented them.
When you try to argue about this, it gets counteracted that 1) China lies, 2) covid is not a joke – so many people have died and continue to die from covid. Are those people reckless with their claims? I wish I could shut them down with such accusations but 1) it is not going to work when they are majority, 2) they are just making a train wreck from data. That's all. Most likely no malice involved.
I think if the FBI reported no homicides investigated by Sandy Hook local police, because state police investigated it, and infowars characterized this as "FBI says no homicides in sandy hook", then that charactierization is false, a falsehood on infowars part. I could allow it wasn't an intentional lie at the time of reporting, but the minute someone tells them their error (surely someone told them?) and they do nothing to update the article, it's crossed the line into intentional dishonesty, i.e. lying.
To clarify "sandy hook police didn't investigate homicides" and "none occurred" aren't the same claim, and representing one as the other is a falsehood.
I think this is because you aren't a conspiracy theorist, and if the government tells you "actually, ignore this inconsistency in our narrative, we meant to say the narrative was consistent all along", you'll say "Oh, thanks for telling me, sorry for getting it wrong", whereas Alex Jones will say "Ha! I'm not dumb enough to fall for your coverup!"
I think this really does turn on whether the writer genuinely believes the Sandy Hook massacre to be fake. Let's suppose he believes there were no murders and that this is the reason the FBI statistics have a 0 in the murder column for Newtown.[1] In that world, the headline may be technically inaccurate (the FBI report refers to "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" rather than people killed, and refers to offences known to law enforcement only) but headlines often are technically inaccurate.
On the other hand, if the reporter knows that the Sandy Hook massacre did occur, then he must know that the data is an anomaly and, as you say, the FBI is not in any sense saying that no one was killed at Sandy Hook, so the headline is a lie.
We can't get away from the fact that whether a statement is a lie depends on the mental state of the person making the statement, so we can't just look at the statement in isolation to see whether it's a lie.
[1] Of course this would be a surprising lapse in an otherwise thorough conspiracy, and I doubt that Infowars in general treats FBI statistics as faultless, but this sort of thing is commonplace with conspiracy theorists.
I've read through and agreed with both articles, but I think your point would be clearer if you went for something a bit less controversial.
https://books.google.com/books?id=5O0DAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false page 46.
Weekly World News - BAT BOY FOUND IN WEST VIRGINIA CAVE- Creature has huge eyes that can see in the ark and big ears the work like radar!
"Scientists claim to have found..."
"Dr. Ron Dillon says..."
"The scientist said..."
"Dillon refused to pinpoint the location of the cave..."
Dr. Ron Dillon, from what I can tell, has never existed, and the whole thing was made up by Weekly World News. However, if they had found an actual scientist named Dr. Ron Dillon to tell them all of this stuff and provide them with photos of questionable provenance depicting Bat Boy, they wouldn't actually be lying at all.
Fundamentally this article, like most articles these days, is written from the perspective of parroting a source's take. While some might consider this to be "spreading misinformation", that is not lying - The only actual fact the media is saying is true is that "somebody told us something". Whether you trust (or expect) the media to actually verify what its sources tell it is another story.
It's satire, as is most of the stuff that it completely made. Some attempts are better than others, both in terms of humor and social commentary, but none of this is meant to be taken seriously.
I actually subscribed to Weekly World News for a couple of years while in college. The articles were made-up, but not as satire; they were the 1980s equivalent of clickbait, for people who were loopy enough to believe them.
I subscribed in order to refine my bs-meter. I finally had to cancel my subscription for my own safety after I found myself wondering whether some of the articles were true.
Maybe satire is the wrong word. That's fair.
I still think that people generally recognized that this is entertainment, not reliable reporting of facts. It's like watching pro wrestling. You can suspend your disbelief as you enjoy it, but people don't really think the piledrivers are real.
I remember being outraged as a little kid that the Weekly World News was allowed to print lies, but even by the time I was a teenager, I found it more amusing than anything else. (I still think "Midnight Star" is one of Weird Al's best.)
As my sister-in-law's grandmother would put it, "the story's for the tellin', not for the believin'."
This is all putting aside the issue of when the non-target audience doesn't get it, like the Chinese government reporting an article from The Onion as straight news.
There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore.
What do you think are the chances that the reporter meant to lie vs. that this is an honest mistake / unintentional awkward phrasing?
Or just not able to understand why the headline is wrong?
"Is this malice, or just incompetence?" I find myself asking that question a lot.
For the Washington Post, I'd put the chances at 60/40 toward malice.
I have a high expectation for WaPo to not publish such an objectively incorrect sentence. In this particular case, I suspect incompetence, because I know how good the average scientist is at interpreting math, and I suspect even above-average journalists could make that mistake. But it should have been corrected within minutes of publication; *not correcting* the mistake suggests malice.
It's a good question I think.
The heading and content of the graph itself is entirely accurate -- I gather the inaccurate wording pertains to a blurb from the home page that links through to the graph. I think that context makes it pretty clear that this is a mistake made by someone who writes blurbs to link to the actual pieces. Unless we want to argue that the blurb-writers are being instructed by people with editorial power to present false information about things that are quickly proven wrong once a reader clicks through.
I don't see how calling this a lie helps us for the purposes of this conversation?
Even if it's impossible to distinguish between "honest mistake" and lies, it doesn't prove the original point. Yes, it's hard to prove the media is lying. No, that doesn't mean they're not doing it all the time.
It's not the opponents who should prove you wrong - it's you doing the assertion and should prove the media's honesty. Benefit of doubt is not a proof of anything.
I know that in other cases, different parts of a Washington Post article are written by different people; I believe that usually, the headline isn't written by the author of the article. There could be a similar thing here, where perhaps the caption was written (or revised) by somebody other than the article's author. And it was an SEO optimization expert who didn't understand the specifics of these statistics.
Is "make the news look good for Democrats regardless of the facts" a deliberate lie, or an unfortunate side effect of the goal?
But to circle around to your overriding point. Is it it misinformation? And is it clearly/cleanly definable as such? I think you're equivocating between lying and misinformation in making your overall point.
Is it this article? https://archive.ph/JXe3K My version says 'Price increases, though still elevated, are beginning to come down', so they may have changed it to make it technically accurate. I don't think it counts if you misinterpret a graph then change it to a more accurate interpretation a few hours later.
The caption is in the homepage blurb about the article, not in the article itself. It's still there as of now, although it was demoted down to half-width from full width.
Seems likely that a blurb writer thinks (wrongly) that "price increases" and "elevated prices" are synonymous.
Note that this is not annualized inflation in the sense of what the yearly inflation would be if it were always like it is in a given month. Rather, it shows the inflation up to a given month from a year prior. It's non-trivial (and in theory not even determined) from a chart like this whether prices are still increasing.
I think that he was in fact actually telling the truth. 9% and 7.1% are annualized rates and are usually the average over the last 12 months. To go from 9% to 7.1% in 1 month requires that the interest rate for that month be negative. If the months inflation had been zero than the rate could only fall to (11*0.09+0*0.09)/12=8.25%.
Two problems with this calculation:
- The decrease in year-to-year inflation from 9% to 7.1% wasn't over one month. 9% was 2021 June 1 to 2022 June 1, and 7.1% was from 2021 Nov 1 to 2022 Nov 1. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/29/economy-2023-outlook-inflation-prices/)
- Even if it had been over one month (say, 2021 Oct 1 to 2022 Oct 1 vs. 2021 Nov 1 vs 2022 Nov 1), your calculation would only work if there had been no inflation in the month from 2021 Oct 1 to 2021 Nov 1. Actually, inflation was already quite high in late 2021.
From a chart of year-to-year inflation like this, it's not possible to tell exactly how high inflation was in a given month.
It is simply and pointedly not a lie. I assume, based on this post being from December 29, that it was a reference to November CPI-U. That also lines up with the fact that November CPI-U's YoY inflation rate was 7.1%. The actual CPI-U in November was 297.711, as compared to 298.012 in October. So elevated prices did, in fact, come down vs. the prior month.
See also https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/is-the-fed-hiking-too-fast
I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html
People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence.
Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test".
>where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence.
This one happens all the time. Also, there is a lot of reporting "speculations"/comments about say federal spending, that are both very easy to fact check and not true.
People are saying bad guy X had not done anything to address Y. Interested advocate Z says that "only $15 smackaroonis were spent on this since 2010, and none of them were authorized by X". Why does bad guy X hate people and do bad things?
When the reality is $120 smackaroonis were spent and $90 of them were authorized by bad guy and you can check confirm this with like 30 minutes of competent research if you know federal spending.
In your last link roundup you included one describing how the International Bullitin of Atomic Scientists published a hitpiece "which they knew to be false at the time of publication" (and also fabricated an interview with two scientists they said they spoke to)
Is that a rare example of a straight-up lie, or are you making the argument that the media AND ONLY THE MEDIA always lies by careful omission, and things that aren't the media like IBAS will still sometimes lie in the classic way if they think they can get away with it?
I actually originally had on that link "I guess this is a rare example of the media genuinely lying!" but took it out because it sounded too confrontational.
A commenter suggested a way that the scientist saying the article author never contacted him (even though they supposedly said they did) could have been an honest mistake. See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-december-2022/comment/11465480
This is also useful context for why this might be an unusual situation - see https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty . I interpret that article as someone with an really strong axe to grind against EA pursuing the investigation, interpreting everything in the worst possible light, and getting so far ahead of themselves that the things they said were not true. I don't think they think of themselves as lying or making anything up, but I think it probably does qualify as such. I remain flabbergasted by BAS' decision to solicit an article from this person and to refuse to correct it besides a few measly editors' notes.
Even if your fine point about outright lies being rare is correct I am not sure that it justifies your views on censorship. The rise of the internet and forums such as this removed a large amount of material from the analysis that traditionally occurred prior to publication. So while infowars might not lie, its content is the source for many lies that are spread through unmoderated content. Having spent the pandemic swatting these lies on a site I had previously worked for I believe all forums should be moderated to remove direct lies. If the business cannot afford to do this that is their misfortune.
You are arguing for censorship. Censorship doesn't work. Your claim that Infowars is a 'source for many lies' could itself be deemed a lie, and removed by your proposed moderation system.
How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura)
Please give me a specific example of the lies that he mentions, with a link to the article that lied if possible.
Here's a link to his analysis:
https://jcpa.org/article/the-muhammad-al-dura-blood-libel-a-case-analysis/
It sounds like someone who believed a story showing accurate video of that story, with the objection being they didn't show other parts of the video. This seems in keeping with all of the other examples I used here of people not deliberately lying, but selectively choosing which true facts to cite.
But Enderlin explicitly claimed that the boy had been killed by Israeli troops; that was the lie. The selective choice of material was to support the lie.
At the time, I thought your original post was so obvious, I didn’t bother to read it. Apparently, there is a large contingent of readers who think the media is really that unsophisticated and, from the looks of it, this is heavily biased towards people who just assume right-wing media is outright lying all the time. Hopefully some folks update, because it’s important to see the obfuscation and misdirection at the level it’s actually occurring.
Anyway, my $0.02 is that the only outright lies I’ve encountered in the past few years (ex. “Matt Taibbi is a right wing conspiracy theorist”) get quietly fixed in the amount of time it takes for me to write an angry post calling them liars. I’m not sure what damage that might cause, but it’s questionable if it’s something worth staging a crusade against. The best argument against that stuff is that the media source should indicate they made errors. While I’d love to see that, I doubt I ever will and merely update my personal priors against that agency, hence I read no newspapers nor watch any televised new, but then again I’ve been riding the “don’t trust mainstream media” train since 1996.
Its a very nice train.
It's a surprisingly well run trains that always seems to get me into the station ahead of everyone else.
I stopped trusting mainstream media since the mid 00's. You got me beat by 10yr. How did you see it coming?
To my credit, I definitely started wondering where the fuck they were when a factual ball was dropped a few times before I gave up on them completely, so maybe you just gave up on them quicker?
I've actually wondered about this. I think the real reason I was able to jump ship on the MSM so early is due to a fantastic media literacy class I took in High School. We were reading Marshall McLuhan and analyzing camera shots and perspective, advertisements, subliminal marketing, etc. I LOVED that class. Since then I always ask, "what does the camera want me to see?" "What information is missing from this picture?" "Who wasn't interviewed?" etc.
Another piece to the puzzle is a gradual dawning that skepticism wasn't enough. I also had to doubt my assumptions and re-evaluate my priors. This started when I went to investigate military fatality numbers during the Iraq war and found that they were almost identical to the numbers during Clinton's term--a huge shock to me at the time. (i.e. the combat fatalities during the Iraq war didn't agglomerate to a meaningful statistic. Most Military deaths are from suicide and accidents) From there I just fell right down the heterodox rabbit hole into the Less Wrong/SSC vortex and overall it's helped me be even more keen on evaluating statistical inferences, false assumptions, and alternative explanations.
Joel, this is special, just for you. My favorite video about 'nice trains' (at 00:16): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdAvjnk3wT0
I appreciate this, thank you
Scott's argument appears to be: so long as the media prints what someone tells them (presumably someone credible), then they cannot be doing anything wrong.
But that's not the role of media. The role of media is not to be the unquestioning sock puppets of experts, but to be critical and professional in their curation of what they disseminate.
MoonOfAlabama.org has a much larger list of "running out of missile" media statements: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/10/russia-having-run-out-of-missiles-launches-barrage-on-ukraine.html
This list is 25 different links from March 2022 to October 2022 - and there have been weekly or more frequently than weekly missile barrages in the several months since then.
I repeat the question: at what point does the mainstream media's unquestioning repetition of obviously wrong memes change from credible to credulous, or worse?
I didn't say they weren't doing anything wrong! I said so many times that I wasn't saying that!
My point is that - as you also say - media has to choose which experts to profile. If you're an insane conspiracy theorist, you will naturally choose to profile insane conspiracy theorist experts (who you think are right), and if you're an establishment stooge, you will naturally choose to profile establishment stooge experts (who you think are right), and if a censor chooses to ban one side rather than the other, they'll be banning them not for "lying" but for having the opinions they have and following the consequences of those opinions.
My original point is still not answered: the mainstream media, in theory at least, has the expertise and the responsibility to be professional/objective/critical/skeptical - not to mention the resources.
The crazy conspiracy theorist as well as the crazy conspiracy theory experts may not have the expertise, certainly don't have the professionalism and generally don't have the resources.
This is a fiduciary failure; not one writ into law but one certainly writ into the professionalism of the 4th estate.
The entire point of the examples of the numerous, repeated and over a long duration series of factually wrong media publications concerning "Russia running out of missiles" is: when exactly does the fiduciary responsibility/professionalism start to kick in?
Taibbi has been saying for some time that the MSM is no more credible than state media in the USSR during the Soviet era. Hard to dispute that given even just this one example.
Just going to say, "running out of missiles" only implies you're using more missiles than you're building. You could be running out of missiles for 100 years if you use one more than you make every year.
You could also say that the sources for these articles are propagandizing, and the journalists sock puppet saying what these sources are telling them are nothing more than stenographers.
Which would be more accurate: what you are saying or what I say above?
Mine is a fact, yours is a guess at intent. Mine is more accurate.
Like, what exactly are you claiming is "factually wrong" about the articles? Are you saying Russia is not running out, that it's replenishing as many missiles as it's spending? That seems completely unintuitive. Are you saying their predicted timeframes are incorrect? Only one of the articles made a prediction on timeframes, and it hasn't been long enough to sink or swim yet. Are you saying they're incentivized to lie? That's true but not definitive; Russia is just as incentivized to lie, and lo and behold we have conflicting information from the three countries.
Re: your facts
What are your facts exactly? The fact that you cannot admit there is a clear and consistent pattern of publishing the same wrong headline for 10 months?
We are talking about literally 10 months of continuous mainstream media articles.
If it were a day, a week or even 3 months - that might be insufficient time to assess but we are talking about nearly a year. I can furthermore guarantee there will be further headlines along the exact same vein. So how long does this period of being wrong, finally constitutes a pattern of failure?
Re: Russia not running out of missiles: yes, it is clear they are not running out of missiles because the same mainstream media is reporting ever larger missile bombardments of Ukjraine. That is a fact or are you going to try and argue that as well?
Re: predicted timeframes - irrelevant. 10 months and counting, see above.
Re: incentivized to lie: I made zero pronouncements of incentive. I published (and others have as well) a clear, consistent and 10 month duration of the same, wrong meme per said media's own reporting of Russia missile barrages. If we want to talk about incentive, there can be lots including incompetence, unprofessionalism, being sock puppets of the powers that be, etc etc.
Lastly: Russia's incentive to lie: it is irrelevant here because they aren't making statements.
The ongoing well reported crashing of missiles into Ukraine is well reported.
Are you really trying to deny that these mainstream reports are not true?
"Russia running out of missiles" and "heaviest bombardment of Ukraine yet" headlines - from earlier this week - are directly incompatible.
I guess you are simply too obtuse to see that.
There are no credible sources. The MSM doesn’t have the resources of the CIA and the picks are between ex-DOD/CIA talking heads who played party to the allowed two mainstream political narratives and any outlier in that pool is some weirdo with lots of baggage.
When Rumsfeld said it was just a few thousand dead-enders left, he probably believed it. Most of the guys in his chain believed it or didnt know. That one DIA embed in Erbil, sure he knew, but the only guy who might run into him and interview him would be a weirdo like Robert Fisk.
And moon isn’t being rationally contrarian, it has always been a reliable fellow traveler.
I remember not being convinced by last week's post. I think I am now.
There's this quote from Paul Halmos: "A good stock of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one". He was talking about math, but I'm starting to think it isn't at all domain specific. Scott gave me 8 (adversarially generated) examples, and now I see the pattern.
The lack of reading comprehension and misunderstanding in the replies to both of Scott's posts certainly demonstrates to me that the people here (a supposedly 'rational' environment) criticising Scott and the media have no better skills in this regard than the journalists they are so upset with, and so how they should expect better results from mere humans is beyond me.
Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, the chistian bakers, James damore's memos. All reported in the forms of lies.
Show me a specific article and what you think the lie is.
Two points:
1. Maybe most of the straight-up lies are done verbally/on video. E.g. Fox News hosts saying things offhand. (Then you might miss them because you don't watch videos/TV, which, fair enough, but most people do.)
2. People could claim that the cherrypicking/context-missing is *as bad* as straight-up lying, due to the "we subconsciously think something is true when we hear it" effect + most people not thinking critically *at all* about most of what they see.
It's not about it being as bad as actual lying or not. It's about whether the strategies that are effective at detecting outright lies will be effective against technically true misinfo.
I agree with your contention that the media -- even InfoWars -- tries desperately to be technically true and that any deception is almost always downstream of that.
For context, I have a much more positive view of the NYT than many people here. Still, I believe the NYT and InfoWars can both wield true facts to launder unstated but obviously implied conclusions.
Certainly there's still plenty of room to defend the NYT relative to InfoWars by debating the relative egregiousness of their behavior in embracing, interpreting, and spinning those true facts.
BUT I actually think you're ignoring a pretty important component of lying.
If I convey a bunch of true facts to you, knowing that you take them as a broader claim but I don't take even the slightest effort to clarify the scope of my assertion, then I would consider what I'm doing lying. And especially in the relationship between news author and reader, it is misleading to the point of lying if the author is holds back counterarguments/contrary facts that the author themselves find persuasive.
The reality is that InfoWars often publishes stories that its own authors believe are false. That is a form of lying. They are leading horses to water over and over again when they know the water isn't actually there. Meanwhile, I do think the NYT is very much sincere in believing the thrust of most of its articles. The NYT is leading itself to water as well. So it is not generally lying, or at least it is not telling readers lies that it doesn't believe.
InfoWars is lying when it leads readers to conclusions that it does not believe.
Why do you think Infowars' authors believe its stories are false? Certainly there are many people who believe Infowars-style conspiracy theories. Why wouldn't Infowars hire those people? Why wouldn't they be the kind of people who found something like Infowars?
Alex Jones has since admitted that Sandy Hook was real. There was testimony in the trial that he knew the conspiracy was a good revenue driver. He lied regularly during the trial (about his texts etc) so there's plenty of evidence that Jones is willing and able to lie.
As an aside, I have personally worked at the NYT newsroom (reporting fellow) and at conservative outlet Washington Examiner. And I found the latter to be much sloppier and less worried about thinking through the impression it gave from facts. The Examiner would headline any big budget deficit number etc on my beat whereas the NYT had very detailed copy editors who would spot factual assertions in my copy that I didn't even consider I was making and push back on them.
On InfoWars, it seems naive to presume that the outlet pushing the most misleading stories (InfoWars) is acting in good faith rather than just supplying readers with what they want. I get the point (one that Noam Chomsky has made) that outlets can just hire the bias that they want. But I actually think it's fairly hard to staff up true believers who can write and report credibly for conspiracy and super rightwing type stuff -- hence why a bunch of liberals like myself found themselves out of college writing for the local section of the Washington Examiner before it was killed.
Conspiracy theorists and right wing outlets are much much sloppier with their false impressions and are often so lazy that they're willing falsely lead readers to conclusions that they know to be false but serve their ideological or financial ends. The NYT is full of true believers. Maybe that just makes them more sophisticated at misleading people but I do think it precludes them from being liars.
What do you think of the claim that Alex Jones admitted he was lying about Sandy Hook because he was under lots of financial and legal pressure to do so?
Also, can you explain more about why the Examiner had to hire liberals, when there are so many conservatives?
It's possible. We're getting into very convoluted psychological storytelling here. I think he could very well be someone who doesn't care about the truth very much. Maybe he "believes" whatever is convenient to him. If he's so cavalier with the truth that it bends to what serves him then I think when he says false things, he deserves the morally laden "liar." Whereas from my experience, I do think the NYT is extremely sincere in trying to tell the truth as they come to it and that motivates most of their staff beyond ideology.
To be clear the Examiner story is somewhat tangential and just fun personal experience from almost a decade ago now. To the extent journalism is a white collar profession of college graduates in the US these days, I think the supply of potential reporters is pretty liberal. And I would say that believing in wild, Sandy Hook-style conspiracy theories is pretty antithetical to the type of person who wants to do really fact-based reporting. Reality has a liberal bent and reporters are in the business of engaging with reality.
This seems like moving the goalposts on lying to me. (Alex Jones tried to use psychosis as a defense in the defamation case btw). If a “media site” is run by mentally unstable people that confabulate information that they themselves believe, from the perspective of the consumer that’s a site that lies.
agreed
Conservative journalism graduates living in Examiner targetted liberal cities?
I suppose it could have been a thing, but many?
Do you think it's fair to compare the preeminent liberal newspaper to a little known conservative one?
Those are just the personal experiences I have to draw from. But what is the best conservative news outlet in your opinion? I can assure you that the WSJ reporters are mostly liberals.
Can you clarify whether your claim is that right-wing outlets, right-wing reporters or right-wing outlets not staffed by liberal reporters are sloppy and lazy?
For ease of discussion purposes, I'm essentially boiling publications down to management and to the reporters.
I think every major news outlet that conducts novel reporting is staffed by liberal reporters (and certainly reporters that voted against Donald Trump). Now I think there are outlets like FoxNews.com and Breitbart etc that are actually staffed by conservative "reporters" and I believe that their quality is poor. They don't publish much novel reporting and they are pretty lazy in their willingness to mislead. So I'm saying that I can't think of any outlets with conservative reporters that are serious (this is totally excluding opinion writing to be clear). I'm open to hearing counter examples. I just don't think conservatives do much reporting -- we can argue about the reasons.
Most media outlets have more conservative management than their reporters. But even at the WSJ my sense is that the editor rungs are pretty normie centrist types and certainly not modern day republican party populists. Sometimes the editors-in-chief have been very murdoch aligned.
In terms of my Examiner experience, there was clearly a very strong conservative mandate from the top. The headlines and story angles were the most biased. Reporters were pretty factual. The bias would be stuff like hating bikes and hating government spending. No one was particularly motivated. And most of the fact-checking hung on the reporters. I don't remember us having much of a corrections policy. So the laziness kind of permeated. I'm mostly talking about intellectual rigor but I do think there was a good deal of actual laziness too.
There is at least one former infowars employee who alleges that their stories are (at least often) known to be false. The most clear-cut example I can quickly find is here:
"Shortly after Jones began selling the supplements, someone posted a video on YouTube holding a Geiger counter displaying high radiation readings on a beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The video went viral, stoking fears that radiation from Fukushima was drifting across the Pacific Ocean. Jones saw an opportunity and sent me, along with a reporter, a writer and another cameraman, to California. We had multiple Geiger counters shipped overnight, unaware of how to read or work them, and drove up the West Coast, frequently stopping to check radiation levels. Other than a small spike in Half Moon Bay — which the California Department of Public Health said was from naturally occurring radioactive materials, not Fukushima — we found nothing.
"Jones was furious. We started getting calls from the radio-show producers in the office, warning us to stop posting videos to YouTube stating we weren’t finding elevated levels of radiation. We couldn’t just stop, though; Jones demanded constant real-time content. On some of these calls, I could hear Jones screaming in the background."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/magazine/alex-jones-infowars.html
Okay, I think I've got it. It's not especially clear whether you think:
A) "In (example) we see (media) being irrational but not lying; they have a biased belief in X"
or
B) "In (example) we see (media) can plausibly act like they are irrational non-liars with a biased belief in X, at least if we only consider (example) in isolation; it does not particularly matter if they actually believe X"
A) asserts their internal mental state, and B) does not.
I think in the case of Jones, A) is false- there is sufficient evidence that he acts with intent to deceive. But he is very good at fulfilling B)- a casual observer cannot distinguish him from an honest lunatic.
I don't think most people are using "lying" to mean "make factual errors".
Because there's no doubt that the NYT regularly makes factual errors. They have a "Corrections" page (1) to show all the self-confessed factual errors they make every day. From a cursory glance these are both uncontroversial, ie the NYT themselves admit factual error, and occasionally important, ie the NYT exaggerating the number of children hospitalized by Covid by a factor of ~12x. (2)
And yet this doesn't, necessarily feel like lying. Good faith error happen all the time and there's an approved process for correcting them, which is publicly acknowledge your mistake and issue a correction. This happens all the time and, presuming the process is followed, usually without ill feelings. And, fair cop, props to the NYT for having this page. But there must be thousands of factual errors on the page over a year and yet I don't "think" anyone feels lied to about that. Maybe in edge cases, where incorrect information was left uncorrected for a year or more for partisan purposes, people feel lied to, but for 90%+ of the corrections on the NYT corrections page, those don't feel like "lies" and if anything they give the NYT more credibility, not less.
Simply put, I don't understand the difference between "lies" and "errors" in your framework. Because people get mad about "lies", at least in my experience they're pretty forgiving about "errors".
And, to lay my cards on the table and avoid the "view from nowhere" issue, I don't get the whole concept of this series. Are you proposing that there are good censors working for admirable purposes? That Infowars and the NYT don't know exactly what they're doing? Who exactly are these reasonable censors you think are making a good faith error? What evidence is there that "misinformation" is anything more than a fig leaf for ideological censorship?
(1) https://www.nytimes.com/section/corrections
(2) https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-massive-correction-covid-hospitalizations-children
I think Scott is building a case for an expansive, `classical liberal' defense of free speech, and these articles are pre-emptive rebuttal of the `but censoring misinformation is easy and necessary and doesn't count as curtailing free speech' line of attack.
Yeah, and that debate feels very...2014. Maybe the stuff I read is too online but this feels like a debate that's passed. I dunno, it's certainly ambitious.
If we want to remain a society that values free speech then this battle needs to be fought. And will probably have to be refought every generation forevermore...
Agreed. And not just in the general case, there are specific near-term decisions that will be made in terms of corporate policy at social media companies and national legislation across the globe. The current dynamic is by no means settled (until the next generation thinks their challenges are unique) and is under active debate
Furthermore Scott’s readership includes many of the key decision makers which makes me really glad to see him (presumptively) take up this issue.
2014? Try 1760 :-)
And it's worth it.
Sure, the wokies control the discourse and say that everybody who wields the free speech argument against them is nazi-adjacent. However, both their wider agenda and this insinuation in particular are pretty unpopular, and it's not clear how exactly are they going to get from here to actual totalitarian dictatorship, without a civil war at least.
They also control the education system so depending on how effective the indoctrination is the answer could be simply to wait.
That depends on how bad the technological stagnation is going to get. You can't indoctrinate away all the evidence that exposes the underlying absurdity of their assumptions quickly enough absent a totalitarian dictatorship, and if stagnation is unavoidable, then humanity is doomed anyway, and all that's left is picking some variety of poison.
I dispute your premise that technological stagnation is coming.
PS, on reflection, I think it's worth clarifying that debate can be very frustrating if you don't use terms in the common way. I think Scott thinks he clearly defined "lying" and that's just not how most people using "lying" and it more closely matches to "error". So it's not that the arguments are incorrect but that they don't really...meet each other. Like ships passing in the night. You can very clearly specify that when you say "pink" you're referring to the color purple but when you point out the "pink" dress, people get confused.
again though I think Scott is using `lying' in the dictionary definition, historical usage sense of the word...
For one more data point, Scott's usage is also the one I would use.
Yep. Me too.
I'm just amazed by the number of commenters who say "most people" don't use the word in the way Scott does, without giving any evidence that the full statement is more correctly "most people I know" or "most people with whom I identify" -- since of course I doubt anyone here has the slightest clue what "most people in the United States" or "most people alive in 2022" mean by the word. Is this by their definition a form of lying?
He hasn’t stated that there are censors making good faith errors. I read him as saying the opposite, that there is no “easy button” that will allow someone to mechanistically separate truth from lies without applying human judgement into the mix.
Yes? Like I said it appears to be a preemptive rebuttal of an anticipated objection to an expansive defense of free speech.
The difference between a lie and an error is that an error is an unintentional falsity while a lie is a manipulative falsity. The article is stating that what people are calling lies don't actually include a falsity, so we don't even get to the intent portion. (I'd probably say 'deceit' covers manipulation with or without falsity. People claim folks are lying when they're instead deceiving.)
Yeah, but this is what threw me and I attempted to address, albeit apparently poorly. The article goes really hard on the factual analysis aspect when that isn't really what grabs people, it's the intent. Like with the Iraq War analysis, this feels like the distinction between "lie" and "bullshit" (1). Which is, like, yes, useful, but If someone said they were lied to and you corrected them and said they weren't lied to, instead they were bullshitted...I'm not sure you're communicating effectively with that person.
Or, to rephrase, I've already linked to an unambiguous list of factual errors committed by the NYT and there's no shortage of people who assume ill will from the NYT by default. It wasn't even hard to find an example of an unambiguous factual error on a CW topic with clear partisan bias.
But that's not what motivated people and that's not why this article came about. Scott wrote an article and got a bunch of interesting comments where there was clearly some kind of miscommunication, "Some commenters weren’t on board with this thesis, and proposed many counterexamples - articles where they thought the media really was just making things up. I was surprised to see that all their counterexamples seemed, to me, like the media signal-boosting true facts in a misleading way without making anything up at all. Clearly there’s some kind of disconnect here!"
And I'm trying to grapple with Scott's argument because, based on very minute differences, it's either egregiously wrong or trivially correct. There's some definition of "lied" where we weren't lied into the Iraq war because, while everyone involved strongly suspected the evidence they presented secondhand was false, they intentionally did not verify these things enough to show they were false. But at the bottom line, using whatever word you want, a lot of people were lead into a horrific war on faulty premises and that's bad.
And this sliver of a technical point is supposed to lead to...?? Who's going to be convinced by this technical nitpicky point?
And maybe this will actually be constructive, but I went back and reread the original and Scott very clearly lays out that this is a nitpicky point and then he'll explain why it's important, so I go down to the fourth section and read through his explanation of why this is important and there's references to a lazy censorship argument and...there's no links. Alright, not true, there's one link to an old SSC post, but there's an assertion there's a broad group of people with censorship power that Scott will be making this argument to and yet no links to this specific argument being argument being made by anyone, much less anyone with censorship power.
And, again trying to be constructive, I would really appreciate some link to these people, to, for lack of a better term, mistake-theory censors. Because I can believe that they exist, even if I've never seen them, but I have no way to model them or understand them and no frame of reference. I definitely believe in conflict-theory censors and there's plenty of evidence for them but who are these people banning accounts who are genuinely, sincerely confused on factual distinctions?
Sorry for the ramble, increased typing speed has lead to more communication, not better communication.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
I think you're stretching a bit on some of these. The general point you made was fine, but you don't have to claim it applies to every single conspiracy theorist for it to be a valid perspective.
For example, on 5, the title of the article is "NEW OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE IS A FORGERY". This statement is false, and intended to deceive; it's a lie. I believe Alex Jones knew it was false too.
The thing that makes this headline a lie even under your definition is that it makes a statement with certainty, where the evidence is tenuous and doesn't justify that certainty. If the headline was "WEIRD VISUAL ARTIFACTS IN OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE: IS THIS A FORGERY?" then it would not be an outright lie, but that's not what they wrote.
I get that you are making a nuanced point about the low-level factual claims in the articles themselves. But I think the hyperbolic headlines are a big part of the problem here; the headline itself is making a claim of certainty about the interpretation of the facts in the article which is false, i.e. not supported by the evidence. (Consider how many people just read the headline of an article in their Facebook feed, or skim the lede.)
I can see a possible maximally nitpicky reading here of your original claim "Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false" because you think Alex Jones really believes the headline summary is true, in the same the sense that a person having a schizophrenic break can literally believe they are talking to God over 5G, and they are not lying when they make that statement because they believe it is true. However, I don't think that applies here; Alex Jones ('s lawyers) explicitly claimed he was lying about Sandy Hook in his court case; his defense was "Infowars Alex Jones is just a character, this stuff is made up, I wasn't really claiming this stuff is true, and no reasonable person would interpret this as a factual claim". This could just be a thing defense lawyers say, but I think it's likely he's knowingly lying in a bunch of these headlines, because it's profitable for him to print this stuff.
I think you'd have supported your argument better if you conceded the point where it's clearly (IMO) wrong, as a way of making it clear you're not claiming "the media NEVER lies", instead of your actual (and I believe useful) point "directionally, the media outright-lies way less than most people think". Your point is not weakened one bit by admitting that Alex Jones does indeed knowingly lie.
I discussed this with Bakkot above.
When I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that.
If later it turned out it *was* a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been *lying* when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning).
Jones states his own facts and the conclusion he infers from them. If his conclusion is wrong, the correct term for this wrongness is "failed inference", not "lying".
This recently elected Santos character: lying or failed inference?
Santos, however, isn’t “the media” in any sense of the term.
What do you think Santos believes about himself?
Didn't Santos admit that he didn't have the experiences he claimed on his resume? Doesn't this fall squarely in the "busted on a lie" box?
Wasn't it ridiculously embellished?
As in Goldman Sachs were a minor client became, he was a star employee of Goldman Sachs.
Looks like at least some of it was 100% unequivocal lying, e.g. when he falsely claimed to have two university degrees. (There's more that probably falls into that category, this is just the clearest example with no wriggle room in what he said and no uncertainty about the facts.)
I agree with you that it's possible that Jones really does believe his schtick, and he's making a mistake, and I agree he's not lying in that possible world -- and likewise we wouldn't be lying if he turned out to be right and we were wrong; just mistaken.
But my point was that it's also a reasonable reading of the situation that he's knowingly lying, at very least knowingly overstating the certainty of the headlines, if not actually at the object level of the claims themselves. We can parse out "lying" vs. "exaggerating with misleading intent" but that doesn't seem to be your point here, you're claiming these claims are good faith failed inferences.
I don't claim this bad-faith interpretation is certain; it's possible he is really getting high on his own supply and believes his conspiracy stuff to the bone. My point is I think it's quite reasonable to give at least 50/50 odds that he's knowingly making bad-faith manipulations. And I personally think the bad-faith interpretation is more likely than the good-faith interpretation after the Sandy Hook trial. I personally think you should weight this possible world more heavily (or at least acknowledge its existence, and make your case for why it's not likely).
Perhaps another lens for this, is that you seem to be ascribing purely Simulacrum Level 1 behavior to these actors (good-faith attempts to model the world and make true statements about the world), whereas I'm making a claim that at least for Jones, I think it's more likely he's consciously operating at Simulacrum Level 3 (making knowingly-false statements about the world in order to honestly build a political coalition), or perhaps even Level 4 (making Level 3 statements without any underlying allegience to a political coalition, just for personal power/gain).
I agree with this. It seems like this terrain gets sorted out through libel suits. And maybe that's a better arena than via broader public policy.
Scott's using this material to talk about the problems with hypothetical censorship of things we might call misinformation (and cannot prove are lies). I hear him saying, it's potentially as problematic to contemplate censoring Infowars' misinformation as it is the NYT's misinformation. He's arguing there is no safe place from which to make censorship arguments relative to the misinformation tactics that media broadly engages in.
As an aside, I'd find it helpful/interesting if he engaged with how other countries that we more or less consider to be democracies with more or less independent media address these issues differently because I think it may cast new light on his core arguments (not sure though).
I agree this thread puts forth some good points on the difficulties of censorship, and I agree directionally with Scott’s main point. (I just disagree that to be consistent you have to ride that horse all the way to defending Alex Jones as a good-faith world modeler.) I think it’s consistent to believe that Jones should not be censored, even though (if?) he’s a liar who knowingly peddles bullshit because it lets him sell more survival kits for bunkers.
One interesting point about libel though - as Musk found out as he speedran the evolution of content policies at Twitter, even speech that is not illegal can be so objectionable that even free-speech maximalists don’t want to associate with you on their platform. (In case that is oblique, I’m referring to Musk (rightly IMO) kicking Ye off Twitter, even though he didn’t say anything illegal when he posted swastikas. Though I’m not sure “due process” was followed.) So that is probably a weaker backstop than is optimal.
On how different countries handle this - I think most countries are much less committed to erring on the side of free speech, I don’t know of anywhere in the EU that has a strong constitutional protection like the US does. Most are more inclined to recognize an obligation not to cause harm alongside a right to free expression, and most are willing to include fairly broad things like “incitement to Naziism/anti-semitism” in the category of “harmful”. Personally I think they go a bit overboard in the other direction, there’s a quite substantial philosophical difference in this regard. For example banning Mein Kampf in Germany until recently, though I can understand the sentiment. I too would be interested in deeper analysis here.
1. Did you investigate lying by omission? That is when they don't report something a reasonable person might think is obviously newsworthy.
Lying by commission is one thing and maybe (just maybe) that is rare.
2. There was a Princeton PhD on whether the "mainstream" media is partisan, many years ago. This is a different question but perhaps it is related to yours. The way they investigated is by counting how often a media outlet mentions the name of the political party when someone in that party has been caught doing something bad. ("Republican senator Gidd caught lying about credential" versus "Senator Gidd caught lying about credential").
3. Btw, regarding perceptions on whether media lies - many ppl believe their side alone is the victim (regardless of which side that is). I found this very interesting. And told myself maybe that is how I should figure out what side I see as mine!
Scott has written about that before - see part III of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/10/16/five-case-studies-on-politicization/
But more generally, I think any discussion of newsworthiness is going to be inherently subjective, much more so than a discussion of truth/falsity.
So there's this psychology test where you give people a list of words like "ice", "cold", "snowman", "santa", "reindeers", etc. And then you ask them whether certain words appeared on the list. Did the word "santa" appear on the list? Yes. Did the word "apple" appear on the list? No. Did the word "winter" appear on the list?
If you ask a word that's semantically related to the words on the list, like "winter", people are more likely to incorrectly think that word appear on the list than semantically unrelated words like "apple".
I suspect this sort of phenomenon is happening with the comments Scott received. The commenters read a bunch of articles that all gesture towards a particular conspiracy theory, for example the idea that the democrats conspired to commit fraud so that they'd win the election. If you ask them whether any of the articles in that list contain a semantically related piece of content (e.g. in the list of articles you've read, is there an article that says "we've found direct proof that the democrats committed fraud to win the election"?), the commenters are more likely to incorrectly state "yes, in fact, the list does contain such an article!" than if you were to ask about a semantically unrelated piece of content (in the list of articles you've read, is there an article that says "rainbows consist of just various shades of the color green"?).
This effect is probably magnified by the fact that most people don't actually read the articles. They'll just read the headline. And furthermore they probably didn't read that headline isolated from any context. More likely, they encountered that headline in the context of "look at this brazenly lying article!"
Very interesting observation, thanks.
I don't entirely trust google (or other search engines) not to insert their own biases. Certainly they routinely fail to show me relevant articles that exist, but the obvious explanation is that they are giving me the lowest common denominator answer - whatever a semi-literate unilingual American would care about.
I also absolutely fail to trust newspapers to preserve the original version of their articles online, rather than revising them; I see this all the time, as new information is revealed. Sometimes the interesting (to me) material disappears in this process; sometimes OTOH the article replaces stock photos with pictures of the actual event reported. (i.e. accuracy and detail may go up or down.)
Your methods would not detect systematic biases against retaining and/or reporting the least honest articles, if any exist. I have no reason to believe that they do exist, but a better research method would collect articles as they are published, and run one's own indexing system over the resulting collection.
The kernel of the "problem" is what do we mean by "the media" and what do we mean by "lying".
Alex Jones lost the defamation claims. "Defamation" has a particular legal meaning which one might equate with "lying" depending on what the definition of "lying" is.
Calling Jones part of "the media", to me, is like TV/entertainment wrestling a sport.
I'd suggest Umberto Eco's essay "the force of falsity" which can be found in his collection called "Serendipities", could be useful backdrop for discussing the relationship between "the media" and "mendacity".
PS are grocery store tabloids part of "the media" and does that change how Scott thinks about his assertion?
Except Alex Jones didn’t lose the defamation claim, he didn’t defend himself and a default judgment was entered. .
That's losing. It's a civil case.
It’s not losing in a way that supports an assertion that his speech was either a lie or actually defamatory.
Default judgements are not handed out at random. They are applied when a party appears to be going to great lengths to prevent a fair trial and does not respond to lesser sanctions. The behavior is interpreted by the courts to be strong evidence of liability.
In Jones' case, I suspect he preferred the default- it allows him to claim unfair treatment for his unskeptical followers.
ETA: I'm talking about mid-pretrial defaults here. A later reply correctly points out that the more common no-show defaults are not very epistemically meaningful.
Who knows why he did it, but iyye fact that a court did not rule on the merits means that you can’t conclude that the statements legally defamatory.
It is my understanding that a default judgement does in fact conclude this. See for example the Heslin v. Jones default order: "...this Court finds that Defendants' egregious discovery abuse justifies a presumption that its defenses lack merit."
(page 3 1st paragraph last sentence) https://infowarslawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/September-27-2021-Court-Order-on-Motion-for-Default-Judgement.pdf
Meh. I am a litigating lawyer. My first jury trial over 30 years ago was a defamation claim.
There maybe be some state law nuances between a "default judgment" and "judgment on the merits" and between a "default judgment" which is reduced to a "final judgement" and a default judgment which is not yet a final judgment, the latter may be vacated.
But I'd think that a default judgement which has become a final judgment does in fact presumptively evidence that the defendant has committed the tort alleged by the plaintiff and has no meritorious defenses. In this case, Jones never moved to vacate the default judgment so far as I know.
So it is entirely appropriate and non-controversial to say that Jones has been found culpable of committing defamation.
IF smilerz has a legal degree and is a member of the bar, I'd like to hear your thoughts. (Among 2 attorneys there are usually 3 opinions.) But if you aren't an attorney ...
I don't think Scott's argument regarding the complications of censoring "misinformation" rise or fall on whether we include InfoWars or grocery store celebrity/alien mags in "media."
Also, whether we accept his definition of "lies" or not, I think his argument still stands that the things we point at when we say the news media is guilty of misinformation are not going to be easily controlled through any kind of objective rule-making.
In the US, the media (aka the press identified in the 1st amendment) has slightly different calculus of culpability regarding defamation than an ordinary person who has putatively made defamatory statements.
It well may be the case that misinformation may not be easily controlled through any kind of objective rule-making, but that conclusion does not rest upon Scott's argument concerning the evaulation of the alleged mendacity of the media.
5: White lines around black elements on the page is how sharpening works. It is often done when scanning.
>You will always need to make judgment calls about which sources’ true facts are important vs. irrelevant, which sources’ studies are valid versus flawed, and which sources’ points that you don’t have good responses to are too annoying or conspiratorial to take seriously anyway.
That last category is doing __a lot__ of heavy lifting, both here and in the original Lies, Damned Lies, And The Media Which Does Not Make Them. I think there's some real inferential difference between "strictly technically did not claim an untrue thing" (which you've admirably demonstrated to my satisfaction and mirth, truth sure is stranger than fiction often) and "disregard the conclusion anyway, because Obvious Sanity Check". Remember when you wrote Heuristics That Almost Always Work? All of these have been *very popular* conspiracy theories/false conclusions endorsed by [vocal thousands...silent millions]. The fact that a good chunk of otherwise-mostly-sane-people can fall into these same gears-level malfunctions again and again...does not inspire much confidence in my own Sanity Check Rock! I'm reminded of the studies showing that education and intelligence seem to correlate *positively* with propensity-to-believe-conspiracies-or-other-false-beliefs. You do gesture at this a bit with the reference to old Motivated Reasoning post, but I think it really underlies a lot more than merits a mere throwaway. Combine that with a slippery top-level word like "lie" meaning different things to different people, and...well, of course confusion will abound.
(Which relatedly makes it interesting that none of the examples here are left-coded conspiracies/false beliefs. Selection bias?)
Finally, will echo that the #2 defense is really weak. My Sanity Check Rock says that "misheard a poll question in ways significantly outside close-phenome range" is itself pretty dubious. You've amended it to include a more-plausible defense, which I appreciate, but that really ought to have been the more intuitive solution first. We already know that the "with covid/by covid" distinction is challenging for many to parse; applying this in the opposite direction to vaccine adverse events seems eminently reasonable. (And this probably explains a lot of Long Covid stuff too.) I.e. it's a baserate error...bad things ever happen, sometimes they coincidentally occur near the event of a vaccination, and this is a totally true non-lying pattern in the data. It's the extrapolating from there that tends to get people in epistemic trouble.
Addendum to finally: less combative title would earn you some Charity Points. The actual body of the post is significantly less hostile, and you do the typical thing at the end of trying to make an olive-branchy conclusion of Everyone Is Right After All, Just In Unexpected Ways. One thing the news really does do is pair misleading clickbaity headlines with articles that sometimes literally say the exact opposite. I think this particular fallability is definitely easier for you to excise than, say, the NYT.
Is there a point at which chains of deliberate misrepresentation become indistinguishable from outright fabrication? Like say there's a shady pollster that uses poor methods to obtain data and throws out results that don't fit their desired narrative. Then there's a shady conspiracy rag that cherry picks from these polls to establish the most extreme/clickbaity version of that narrative, trying it all together with lots of logical fallacies. Then some talking head reads that rag and decides to summarize it in an unscrupulous and reductionist manner on their news program. At the end of that chain you have a claim that is completely divorced from reality. Does it effectively matter that the lie has a paper trail? It's almost like a game of telephone where everyone deliberately shifts synonyms in and out until the result shares literally nothing in common with the original phrase.
The point regarding how we combat it. If the talking head just makes it up out of whole cloth, then we have one set of remedies. But if they they are just careful to reference articles and conduct interviews with crazies, then they are probably protected from certain classes of regulation. You would either need to impose more absolute liability (which has repercussions for legitimate news) or maybe bring back the both-sides style fairness doctrine. Or adopt some other measure, but the specifics of the standards/laws/rules are probably different
Somewhere i heard about a survey in Poland asking the question, "have you during the last year been decapitated" and 4% said yes
Lizardman Constant Strikes Again
Probably here: https://twitter.com/qikipedia/status/1250408537752305664?lang=en
And this reference trail is looking very circular ...
Like this: https://xkcd.com/978/
Maybe this is just racist anti-Polish rhetoric.
Where exactly did you hear that Poland was involved?
Without a doubt, the MSM does often propagate blatant falsehoods on the subject of intelligence research and the behavioral sciences. For example, the media will often characterize factual info on IQ as "pseudoscience" or as "debunked" when in fact the data is commonly accepted knowledge among experts. Not sure how much of this misinformation is due to ignorant blank slatism or deliberate mendacity though.
I suppose the question is how often to they authoritatively say something is debunked, vs using a supporting quote or or reference of some kind?
They're invariably stated without a supporting source--declared simply as an obvious fact.
I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists
Someone upthread just posted https://realrawnews.com/2022/12/nancy-pelosi-hanged-at-gitmo/
Presumably just about anything from The Onion or The Babylon Bee would also technically count - but those sites are not even pretending to be `real' news. Ditto the Borowitz report, although the NewYorker does claim to be real news. How do you disambiguate `lies trying to pass off as the truth' from `self-confessed-lies for humor/effect?' I have no idea what Real Raw News is but judging from the article title I would assume this is in the same vein as The Onion.
I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc.
One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things.
Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved.
I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?
Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up?
There only "conspiracy theories" once you stop believing in them (or never have). Until then, they're "obvious" things that "everybody" knows to be true (so going through the evidence and arguments personally, and carefully, is just a big waste of time).
I don't think that's right -- the conspiracy theorists that I've encountered often seem keenly aware that the 'masses' don't (yet) agree with them. "Wake up; you've been lied to" and all that sort of thing.
Point taken. Conspiracy theory is a loaded term. However, the "conspiracy" captures an important common element - that people with power both know and are deliberately obscuring the truth. Now, are people with power deliberately obscuring the truth? I'd say generally not. There are inconvenient facts they are choosing to ignore, or at least remain ignorant of when they shouldn't be. But that doesn't really differentiate them from everyday people. We all do that. That issue is also that people with power have singular and non-contradictory motives which allows them to coordinate on complex obscuring far better than the average person. I think this type of thing does happen tacitly. But the prior about whether overt attempts to pull it off work is the difference between one way of thinking (normies call it conspiring theory) and another (conspiracy theorists call them sheeple).
Maybe the technical point about lying is correct but it fails to address the broader problem of misinformation. This has been critical in the context if the pandemic. Proving that the toxic misinformation was not actual lying will not lower the deaths it was reposible for or protect us from the same or worse in rhe future. Censorship may be bad but unfortunately at times it is the least worst option......and really do you think the merchants of misinformation are actually worth defending on the basis of the technical definition of lying?
I think if you want to fight something it is useful to know what you are fighting against. People constantly propose plans to fight misinformation which would work if the misinformation was direct lying, but fail if the misinformation was signal-boosting facts out of context.
So what's your proposal to fight misinformation in all its varied forms? At some point any attempt at a black and white analysis will fail so there will always be a reliance on human judgement and that will always be flawed. The perfect is the enemy.of the good.
Twitter allows me to curate my news sources. I think I'm genuinely interested in the truth but would I be critical in analyzing myself?
Prediction markets can fight misinformation. But relatively few people care enough about accuracy to be interested in them.
"Prediction markets can fight misinformation. But relatively few people care enough about accuracy to be interested in them."
A Great Courses course on Economics introduced me to the concept of "rational ignorance." The idea is that on many topics it is rational (in the economics sense) to be ignorant because the cost of not being ignorant is too high.
My model of the world is that VERY FEW people actually care about being correct. People do care about agreeing with their friends and peer and tribe. For these folks, it make very little sense to actually form an independent opinion -- best case is they wind up where they were going to go anyway and worst case is they discover that they shouldn't agree with people with whom they want to agree.
Stack this on top of the effort required to actually dig through data, understand the definitions in play, run statistical analysis, take into account p-hacking ... even for the folks who DO care there are just too many topics to investigate.
Yep, this is a great point. I'd also add that people honestly underestimate the degree to which they are ignorant, both because admitting this is low-status and because they rarely face the opportunity to be decisively proven wrong.
> So what's your proposal to fight misinformation in all its varied forms?
This question confuses me. We have a way, and have for centuries. It's called liberalism. Are you somehow unaware of it? You allow all information, all claims, and let the marketplace of ideas, liberal science, fight it out. Eventually, the truth will become clear to most people.
Liberalism is an approach one can take, but I don't know if I would call it a "proposal to fight misinformation in all its varied forms". One wouldn't call drug legalization a "proposal to fight drug abuse" either, even if one believed it was a better policy.
It is absolutely that. Liberalism doesn’t simply mean “let everybody say what they want.” It does mean that, of course, but there’s more to it. It means, “Let everybody have it out, and let the best ideas win.” This is what is supposed to happen in science, and it’s what liberalism advocates for society. It says that people, in general, can be trusted to know good ideas from bad ones, given enough time. And you know what? That has worked out pretty well! Look at civil rights, gay marriage, marijuana legalization. The better arguments for these superior positions gradually won out.
And if the public *can’t* be trusted to know what’s best—what does it mean to have a democratic society then? If elites get to dictate to the masses what they are allowed to see, hear, think, and believe, who is actually in charge?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
There is no guarantee that the best ideas will win out. Archaeologists converged on "pots not peoples" after WW2, rejecting the earlier belief in volkwanderung... but genetics shows those post-WW2 archaeologists were completely wrong. Medicine was mostly harmful up until the 20th century but people treated it seriously anyway throughout history without the correct idea of rejecting it winning out.
You have given a list of things that are currently popular and weren't in the past, and because they are popular now you express a Whiggish belief that the best won out. But how do you know? In a thousand years if all those things became unpopular and reversed a future version of you could announce that the better (opposite) argument eventually won out.
There's lots of things that both the masses & elites have mistaken beliefs about. Who actually does know things? People who can make accurate predictions.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-experts/
The market place of ideas was taken over by the superstores of bullshit about a decade ago.
Right about the time when the censorship spree became truly far-reaching. Yes.
One example that just keeps confusing people is the gender wage gap. Prominent people keeps repeating directly or implying the “equal pay for equal work” is the problem - which hasn’t been the case for decades and is already illegal. When instead the much harder to solve mix of conditions like gender-profession-preferences, or maternity related career impacts, firm-preferences (for benefits/work-life-balance) and other factors need to considered. There just aren’t many firms out there outright paying less for the same title, even if there is a desire to find a sexist bogeyman. But engaging in the complex analysis, just seems like a nonstarter compared to the rhetorical value of the alternative.
Signal-boosting facts out of context.
This might be the most accurate definition I have seen of misinformation that is scarily rampant.
For example, VAERS does collect reports of problems people think they have had from vaccines.
However, that is only a starting point. These reports have to be investigated. Some might turn out to be real, and in my opinion (just my opinion) most would be paranoid ppl imagining causation.
If you want to spread conspiracy theories about the vaccines you'd stop right at that collection of reports.
Isn’t there an extra step of implying some deeper meaning to the initial data? It isn’t just a neutral presentation.
That's just the point: It simply isn't as easy as censoring false claims, because few people are making genuinely false claims. So you have to censor on a different basis; presumably that people have come to conclusions you don't like. That's a lot less straightforward than being able to censor false claims.
Although I would say that the censorship that has gone on in the last two years has made everything much, much worse. There is no doubt that true (or at least plausible) claims were censored, such as the lab leak hypothesis. All that has accomplished is many more people taking the conspiracy theorists, who have been proven right at least once, much more seriously.
Or, maybe, *don't censor at all.* Remove things that meet the legal standards for categories like true threats, child pornography, and defamation (with a court order). And things that fail to meet the particular community's standards. None of this should involve the government except getting a court order for defamation.
So loosen the standards of allowed misinformation? It has already delayed climate action, resulted in a large number of unnecessary covid deaths and sparked a determined attack on US democracy. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
There are no "standards of allowed misinformation". The 1st amendment means that the government *cannot* establish such. And as both a practical and theoretical matter, trying to establish such is utterly wrong. Giving *anyone* coercive power over the communication of others runs tremendous risk. And doing it over such things is handing a child a nuke...with a trigger set to go off at the slightest jog. Or maybe like building an AI *intentionally designed to kill people*.
It is the attempted suppression and successful politicization of these issues that have caused these things, not allowing people to hold unapproved ideas. Climate change in particular: When those most vocal about its catastrophic effects oppose the most effective means of reducing carbon emissions, it becomes extremely clear that, for most climate activists, climate change is merely a useful cudgel which will allow them to enact their political agendas. And this isn't to say that climate change isn't an enormous threat! The problem is, I don't know! When scientists and researchers who deviate from approved opinion are vilified and ostracized rather than responded to rationally, when the censorship regime you want is in place and ensures a monoculture in science on this subject, when the "official" sources speak with one voice (which is **never** how science works), when there are clear problems with the narrative, but those who question it are delegitimized, exactly as you want, I, who have spent quite a few hours over several years looking into this, don't know what the truth is, but I *do* know that official pronouncements and received narratives cannot be trusted.
The effects you are decrying *are largely a result of the attempt to control the narrative just as you desire.*
Aaaah yes! The catastrophic decline on trust! Now there is something worth considering. There has been a clear determined effort to undermine science since the 60s. It began with the advertising techniques used to raise doubt about cigarettes and cancer, the techniques were then picked up by the fundamentalists to attack evolution, then the fossil fuel companies spent billions using the same techniques to attack climate science and, finally, their efforts were so succesful that when the pandemic came around, lots of people chose to not believe the science. And how did that turn out? The US had an appalling per capita death rate compared to other developed nations. Science makes mistakes and was initially wrong about the nature of covid transmission......but countries who based their pixies on science achieved much.lower death rates and much more rapid economic recovery.
And so…the response is to adopt the same partisan attitude, except in service of science? To say that certain views should not allowed to be aired?
Let’s look at cigarettes and cancer. You’re certainly right that the cigarette companies fought the cigarettes/cancer link. Now fast forward to, say, 2000. Is there anybody who still thought that cigarettes did *not* cause cancer? No. And yet there was no campaign of censorship against the pro-cigarette movement! Somehow, people figured it out! Yes, it took time; reaching the truth always does. But the censorship and groupthink campagins in climate change, covid, and so many other things nowadays not only feels profoundly Orwellian, it destroys the process of liberal science which society uses to discover the truth, by appointing a relatively small number of elites who get to dictate what the truth is to everyone. The problem (other than whether you can trust those elites, as the lies propagated by them regarding Covid show) is that people start doubting the official narrative en masse. There will always be randos who won’t believe what you want, but now you’ve got damn near half the country extremely skeptical of anything elites try to tell them, first because they were caught in obvious lies, second because if you’re trying to suppress information, the only sensible reason is that you’re trying to hide the truth. Which just makes sense, right? If you weren’t afraid of it, you wouldn’t try to suppress it. If it wasn’t true, you would simply debunk it with rational arguments, not try to ensure no one can hear it. So there’s a reasonable, rational presumption that anything someone doesn’t want you to hear is likely the truth.
This is long, but I extremely strongly recommend this video: https://reason.com/2013/10/25/video-the-new-and-old-attacks-on-free-th/
If you absolutely can’t watch that, there’s an extremely abbreviated and ineffectual version here: https://reason.com/2005/12/30/the-triumph-of-liberal-science/
Information about the lab leak may have been censored in China but it was widely discussed in scientific journals and major media outlets across the western world and still has not been ruled out. The scientific consensus is that it is significantly less likely than a natural origin. If you want equal time for all possible hypotheses on issues of scientific concern you are likely to be disappointed. I would be interested in the point on which you think conspiracy theorists have been proven correct as I am unaware of it.
You're really not aware of the ban on that subject on YouTube and elsewhere? That YouTube censored any information about Covid not verified by the FDA? And that this was in line with government officials calling it obviously false misinformation?
And this is just one instance. We could go on about government misinformation and suppression of information regarding masks, natural immunity, etc. etc.
Youtube is a publisher and did what publishers do.....decided not to publish certain content. Information about the lab leak hypothesis was widely available elsewhere. Oh and during a pandemic in which misinformation caused a large number of avoidable deaths sticking to the best available evidence and blocking dangerous fringe ideas is ......ethical.publishing
I’m confused as to what your argument is. “Censorship wasn’t happening!” “Oh, it was, but it wasn’t universal! Also, it was a good thing!”
These are strange responses to “censorship backfired.” And the arguments you’re using seem suspiciously like the standard talking points I’ve heard over and over on these subjects, almost like you’re trying to advance a certin agenda rather than discover the truth.
The decision by a publisher not to publish is not censorship. It is part of the business.
"...do you think the merchants of misinformation are actually worth defending on the basis of the technical definition of lying?"
Some of don't trust that the folks who will be in charge of the censoring have our own best interests at heart. Would you be in favor of censorship if you were fairly convinced that the "other side" would get to decide what to censor?
I am not suggesting government censorship. I believe publishers have a responsibility to be ethical and not print material for which there is no evidence. Free speech does not, and never has, included the right to publication, not here, not anywhere. The decision to publish is the responsibility.of the publisher. For example, if a source you rely on provides inaccurate medical advice that results in a serious illness, they should be liable, in a similar way to Jones being found liable in the Sandy Hook case.
> I am not suggesting government censorship. I believe publishers have a responsibility to be ethical and not print material for which there is no evidence.
You're in luck! There is no material like that.
Well I suppose it depends on what you consider evidence. If you consider weak correlations, vague insinuations and unsupported assertions to be evidence then I suppose you may be right.
Plate tectonics started out with Abraham Ortelius noticing the coast of South America, North America, and Africa might slot together nicely. Mind you, this was in the 16th century when maps were not so great and he of course did not propose a detailed mechanism, and yet, his intuition was absolutely correct. It's good he lived in a time when hall monitors were far fewer in number so that his intuition could survive to help usher in the modern geophysical view of the world.
The rejection of a scientific hypothesis supported only by weak evidence in the 16th century would seem to be irrelevant to this discussion.
I saw an interesting example of a media source lying earlier this year, albeit not (I think) intentionally.
First, the background. In the Budapest Memorandum, in 1994, the US, UK and Russia all agreed they would not invade Ukraine. They didn't commit to defend it if it were attacked: they just each promised that they, themselves, would not do so. Then, in 2020, Russia broke this agreement by invading Ukraine.
In the following months many, many media sources mentioned that the US and UK had made "security guarantees" to Ukraine. This is technically true, in that the US and UK had guaranteed that Ukraine was secure against any threat from them, but (I think) deliberately misleading, because it could also be taken to mean that they had guaranteed Ukraine's security from *other* threats, and were now required to join its war against Russia. The phrase "security guarantees" in media articles was used in such a manner that the true meaning wasn't clear, and the latter (false) interpretation was at least left possible, if not implied to be correct. Unsurprisingly, some people believed this to be the case: I saw video of one (non-journalist?) person heckling the UK PM, invoking this misinterpretation to claim that he was obliged to enter the war on the Ukrainian side.
Journalists are, of course, only human, and a large fraction of media output consists of rewrites and reinterpretations of articles from other journalists, simply because that's easier than looking up facts directly. And this, I think, led to the one case I saw of a media source stating flatly that the misinterpretation of the Budapest Memorandum, above, was correct. (I'm sorry for not having the original link to hand; downweight the reliability of this story appropriately.) The journalist had probably read a range of articles, had been fooled exactly the way the general public were being fooled, hadn't taken the time to look up the original text of the Memorandum, and presented this falsehood as fact. After all, the media wouldn't actually *lie* to them, right?
To be fair, there is a little more to this than simply a journalist's confusion. Even as the memorandum was drafted, there was an ambiguity introduced by the distinction between the non-obliging 'assurance' and the stronger 'guarantee' in English, which is not present in the Russian, and which required all parties to acknowledge the nuance. See: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/05_trilateral_process_pifer.pdf p. 23-24
Not the first time a minor inconsistency between drafting languages has proven consequential - consider for example the famous difference between the English and French wordings of UNSCR 242, the former calling on Israel to with withdraw from "occupied territories" implying merely some, while the latter referring to "_the_ occupied territories", implying all.
> Even as the memorandum was drafted, there was an ambiguity introduced by the distinction between the non-obliging 'assurance' and the stronger 'guarantee' in English, which is not present in the Russian, and which required all parties to acknowledge the nuance.
No such distinction is present in English, either. See e.g. sense 3 of the word "assure" in Merriam-Webster, which is "guarantee". ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assure )
The document you cite says this:
> English draws a distinction between “guarantee” and “assurance,” while both words translate into “guarantee” in Ukrainian and Russian. U.S. officials read for the formal negotiating record a statement to the effect that, whenever “guarantee” appeared in the Ukrainian and Russian language texts of the Trilateral Statement, it was to be understood in the sense of the English word “assurance.” The Ukrainian and Russian delegations confirmed that understanding.
But the document does not bother to explain what the English-language distinction is supposed to be, and it's obviously false as a factual matter that there is one.
That's my fault, I cited the page references for Steven Pifer's account hastily and incompletely. Sorry about that. On page 17 you'll find the following:
"American officials decided the assurances would have to be packaged in a document that was not legally-binding. Neither the Bush nor Clinton administrations wanted a legal treaty that would have to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. State Department lawyers thus took careful interest in the actual language, in order to keep the commitments of a political nature. U.S. officials also continually used the term “assurances” instead of “guarantees,” as the latter implied a deeper, even legally-binding commitment of the kind that the United States extended to its NATO allies."
Note also, for corroboration, a letter exchange between Yeltsin and Clinton, just over a month before Budapest, in which Yeltsin refers to 'guarantees' ( https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/27159-doc-05-yeltsin-letter-clinton - third to last paragraph) and Clinton quite deliberately answers with 'assurances.' ( https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/27160-doc-06-clinton-letter-yeltsin - second paragraph, noted also in the archive's description)
As I'm sure I don't need to tell you, lawyers and diplomats tend to parse the English language a little differently from the rest of us - with an eye to respecting various niche conventions. This, from the perspective of State, is one of them.
What are some consequences of breaking a formal guarantee that wouldn't also attach to breaking a formal assurance?
- It is harder to maintain the position that the thing you've breached does not constitute a treaty binding under international (not domestic) law as per the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
- It is harder to maintain the position that the breach wasn't in fact a breach, against an argument (based on VCLT articles of interpretation 31-33) that the language of guarantees, interpreted in good faith, implies an obligation to act based on how you and others have used it in the context of other agreements.
- Related, breaching the thing calls into question the value of your guarantees in other contexts, where you used 'guarantee' in conjunction with specific commitments to act.
And, as Pifer notes, all of this, in the US, has implications if you're trying to avoid Senate involvement.
This is still a consideration today, and journalists are still cavalier about the terms even while they cite diplomats drawing the distinction verbatim:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/04/sweden-says-us-has-offered-security-guarantees-if-it-applies-to-join-nato
What Linde got for the interim period while NATO application processes, and she states this explicitly, were 'assurances', but headlines are gonna headline.
Interesting, I had not heard that before, thanks.
The original wording of the Budapest Memorandum is available here: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G94/652/92/PDF/G9465292.pdf
The word "assurances" appears only in the title. Regardless of whether or not this should be considered synonymous with "guarantees", I think the actual clauses are quite clear that none of the signatories are being bound to come to the defence of Ukraine - which is the way the media were misinterpreting it.
"In the following months many, many media sources mentioned that the US and UK had made 'security guarantees' to Ukraine. This is technically true..."
I'm not even sure that it is true that Ukraine had a security guarantee from the US. The Senate never ratified anything, so there is clearly no *treaty*. Can a US president commit future US governments just on their say-so? I don't think they can in a legal sense. My position is that Ukraine had a guarantee from Bill Clinton (and, presumably from John Major and Boris Yeltsin), but that none of the folks agreeing to this had the authority to commit their future governments' actions without further legal actions that were never taken.
I think it's a bit of a mess. The President generally has wide latitude in foreign relations, and historically has initiated military action of various types and lengths, from invasion to peacekeeping forces, sometimes backed up by some kind of resolution Congress passes (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the AUMF), and sometimes not (the invasion of Grenada). The President can also make what are called "executive agreements" which have the force of a Federal law during his Administration, but which cannot bind his successors unless they are preauthorized by Congress (e.g. NAFTA), that is, are actually encoded as law.
A treaty is considered to formally bind the United States, and I believe has a status above Federal statute (so if a law conflicts with a treaty the treat prevails), and the Constitution says these can only come into force when 2/3 of the Senate concurs. But there was the weird case of President Carter unilaterally abrogating the treaty between Taiwan and the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-American_Mutual_Defense_Treaty
Yes, much like the old Helsinki Accords themselves (of which Budapest is largely an adaptation that acknowledges the existence and rights of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine instead of the Soviet Union), the Joint Framework with North Korea, and the more recent Iran deal, Budapest represented a non-binding political agreement, not a treaty under US law. It may, however, be considered a treaty under international law, which, as set out in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (which the US has also signed-but-not-ratified), has a much broader scope of what 'treaty' means.
One can certainly question the value of these kinds of commitments, especially if they lack explicit enforcement mechanisms beyond just a vague 'if anyone breaches this, we'll kick it to the UNSC', which is great until one of the breaching signatories or its bestest big buddy has a veto. And one can certainly single out the US for being... somewhat mercurial about its international commitments (the ones it bothers entering into, anyway) and about its view of international law as such.
But international obligations are not a starkly binary idea, and executive and political agreements can serve to declare states' intentions in a usefully explicit way, with both diplomatic/reputational and real costs attached to flaking out, however legal it might technically be. Especially if you're not the United States.
Which is exactly what happened to President Kuchma when the Ukrainian parliament smelled a rat and tried to get something more solid, like actual security guarantees, out of the US and the UK before the country gave up the full leverage of its ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal. He was told in no uncertain terms that US-Ukrainian relations would suffer and carrots would disappear if his parliament kicked up trouble over this perfectly non-binding political agreement. And so he squared it with the Rada and signed.
That's right, but what discussions about the Budapest memorandum usually miss is that Ukraine (and Belarus) had agreed to give up their nuclear weapons to Russia in 1991, as part of the raft of treaties which dissolved USSR. Here is the text of the specific treaty: http://web.archive.org/web/20140725212330/http://base.spinform.ru/show_doc.fwx?rgn=27062 By this treaty Ukraine and Belarus obliged themselves to join the non-proliferation treaty as non-nuclear states and to transfer all tactical nuclear weapons to Russia by July 1, 1992, although it does not discuss strategic nukes. If memory serves, this agreement was brokered by USA. The Budapest memorandum itself was the result of Ukraine having second thoughts about this treaty, signed when the returns from its independence referendum weren't yet three weeks old (inb4: I'm not saying Ukraine wasn't bound by that treaty or shouldn't have been bound by that treaty). Here are links to some useful materials on the topic I dug up some time ago:
Nuke-related under-the-table military-diplomatic activities after the dissolution of USSR: http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/pikaye13.pdf
Links to more sources including about Ukraine not having operational control:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140819085816/http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/7316/ukraine-and-the-1994-budapest-memorandum
FAS page on Ukraine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140822013256/http://fas.org/nuke/guide/ukraine/
**ETA**: fixed copy-paste error (same link was repeated twice)
Thank you for the links, this is very good. But, as you note, broad NPT commitments aside, the Alma-Ata agreement only dealt directly with tactical weapons, not strategic weapons (roughly 1900 warheads' worth of the latter on Ukrainian territory) whose status remained a muddle.
The question of operational control over these strategic nuclear weapons is nonetheless a fascinating one, which I agree doesn't get adequately considered in these discussions. The Minsk agreement subsequent to Alma-Ata, made it so that the Russian president was the one with the overall button but was required to consult with the heads of the three other republics. This was clearly preposterous and untenable if the weapons were to have any deterrence value, and it was inevitable that the CIS republics would end up overriding it with another arrangement. Moreover, American analysts believed that Ukraine was capable of asserting control over at least some of the strategic arsenal. See discussion in this contemporary Stimson Center report, pages 30-31, which concludes with:
"Despite the significant obstacles, a strongly motivated Ukraine would probably be capable, albeit with substantial sacrifices, of resubordinating and supporting at least some of its ICBMs for a number of years. It has sufficient economic resources, part of the SOF production and maintenance infrastructure, the technical and military cadres, as well as the electronics and programming centers. One of the available options might be to modify the ICBM nuclear warheads for employment as gravity bombs deliverable by aircraft. But in any case, Ukraine’s potential SOF would remain unstable and vulnerable for many years, and consequently would represent a highly provocative strategic target."
So I think the Ukrainian leverage I talked about was significant, but you're right to point out that it wasn't nearly of the same weight as "we've got nearly two thousand nukes credibly pointed at your cities."
Ukraine probably _was_ technically capable of eventually establishing operational control over some of the strategic nuclear weapons, as that report says, but it is questionable (to put it mildly) whether Russia would have allowed that to happen. The FAS page I linked to states that
> Ukraine initially announced its intention to obtain operational control over the strategic nuclear weapons deployed in its territory. Responding to these intentions, Russian military officials responded that attempts to interfere with, or to damage the command and control systems of, Russian strategic troops located abroad would constitute a direct military threat to the Russian Federation.
It does not cite sources for this statement but I find nothing whatever implausible in it. Ukraine would not have been able to keep such activities secret from Russia at that time. Also, the strategic troops themselves would have had little reason to respect commands from newly independent Ukrainian military authorities, as they were used to being subordinate directly to Moscow.
This is a good point: without ratification by the Senate the Budapest Memorandum is not legally binding on the US, and I assume something similar applies for the other countries involved.
Having a closer look at the text, however, I see that the relevant clauses aren't presented as (e.g. clause 1) a commitment to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, but as a *reaffirmation* of their commitment to do so - the original commitment presumably having been made in a separate, ratified treaty.
(Text here: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G94/652/92/PDF/G9465292.pdf )
Does Bayern have a well-known illuminati? That would explain why there's that big golden triangle with an eye on St. Josef's Church. (it's baroque, in case you're wondering about timeframe)
>Censorship proponents imagine a world where “good sources” are doing something fundamentally different from “bad sources”; the good sources are going out in the world and reporting true facts, the bad sources are just making things up.
Well, no, not exactly. Censorship proponents imagine a world in which some people come to Approved Conclusions, and other people come to Unapproved Conclusions, and want to propagate the former and ban the latter. "Truth" doesn't enter into it, except that for them, "Approved Conclusions" and "Truth" are synonymous.
They're not interested in genuine truth. They just want narratives they consider dangerous, regardless of some hypothetical objective truth value, to be disallowed.
Yes. It is stunning how many don't have much interest in the genuine truth. (Do I? I like to think so.)
Maybe this is why lies in the news media are part of their business model itself now.
Every new media outlet claims it is different but they just have their own biases and desire to change the world according to THEIR ideas of good and bad.
News == Activism.
Not pursuit of the truth.
False equivalence. You are lumping in ethical publishers who publish extensively researched material which, on the evidence, they believe to be true, with unethical mouthpieces for vested interests. Many ethical publishers do wish to change the world......for the better. The others want to change the world to increase the wealth of their sponsors. Not the same thing is it?
And which is which? Can *you* tell? What criteria do you use to distinguish them?
I think it is obvious. Ethical publishers support evidence based policies to improve community welfare and support their views by stating the sources of the evidence they rely on.
And—given the post you’re responding to—how do you tell the difference between these two things, given that the unethical ones use evidence, purport to be trying to improve community welfare, and state the sources of evidence they rely on?
More pointedly, just which are these ethical, trustworthy news sources you speak of?
"given that the unethical ones use evidence, purport to be trying to improve community welfare, and state the sources of evidence they rely on?"
Well I suppose the understanding of community welfare may vary but I think there is a significant difference between policies that are likely to work and the policies promoted by unethical publishers like infowars, Fox News and so on. There is an enormous amount of historical evidence about the kind of policies that improve community welfare. It is hard to imagine that anyone genuinely believes that the climate change denial has been a win for the community.....or the repeal of gun laws,,,,or arguing against effective public health measures during the pandemic
If we are going to try to address this shouldn't we start with acknowledged falsehoods rather than running through anecdotes? Public newspapers offer retractions (on page 74, in small print) is there not some organization that tracks these so we can start with a baseline of how often a newspaper is forced to admit that they printed an outright untrue statement?
I hope you are saying that a newspaper that prints a retraction is automatically better than one which doesn't, so the greater number of retractions is likely to be a sign of better quality.
Because trying to characterise retractions as a negative to be condemned is a terrible idea. Retractions and corrections are a positive good to be encouraged.
I'm not trying to characterize them in anyway, I'm simply stating that we should have a database which includes all the fabrications which were caught and forced an admission.
Most false statements are mistakes, not fabrications.
Most retractions are not forced, they're done voluntarily as a matter of principle.
Even if we grant such assertions, we still have retractions representing a database of how often factually incorrect statements get through the editing process which allows for a baseline for determining intent should we find (for example) a potential political bias in false facts getting through.
We can also still go through such a database and discern the two types of mistakes- those that materially change or strengthen/weaken a story, and those that are incidental to the story. Which again should almost certainly be superior to 'we should count this as a lie' or 'does this article actually represent the bulk of articles on the subject from 2 years ago'.
> Even if we grant such assertions, we still have retractions representing a database of how often factually incorrect statements get through the editing process.
The problem is that what you get by counting retractions is a product of two terms: (how often factually incorrect statements get through) * (proportion of factually incorrect statements that get retracted).
And those two numbers are likely to be anticorrelated - in a media source with high standards the former will go down and the latter will go up - so the product probably isn't telling you much.
Your followup article highlights that your original article was addressing the wrong question. As shown by so many of your examples above, there is always *someone* saying just about *anything* it's imaginable to say. So anyone who wants to lie without lying simply needs to find some X saying the lay and report "X says....". The problem is not the generation of misinformation but the *sourcing* of it.
I think the right way to assess news sources' reliability is to ask "how often do they report someone saying something false *without indicating that it is false*". I think you would find that our "quality" news sites do this far less than the conspiracy sites, and fox news is somewhere in the middle.
Actually there are two related question: how often do they fail to correct something false because *they* are misinformed (incompetent) and how often do they fail to correct something false when they actually know better (malicious). Distinguishing requires knowledge of the reporters' inner state, so is difficult.
You may argue that news should never publish statements they know to be false, but sometimes those statements are highly newsworthy---for example, the reporting on recent anti-semitic remarks by Ye and others would be much weaker if it couldn't say what those remarks are.
Note that this broader definition of "lying by quotation" is still much narrower than the approach on which you focus, of misleading with correct but incomplete information. Our traditional news sources do engage in that behavior, but it's a different problem than straight out lying (by quoting).
I do research on misinformation, and I believe the problem of sourcing requires far more attention. We should be working towards an ecosystem where every statement is attributed to an entity, and also where entities can indicate their agreement and disagreement with others' statements, all in a machine readable fashion, so that we can begin to build tools that can automate the process of a user asking "does anyone I trust assert, directly or through a chain of trust, that this statement is accurate?"
+1
"Quality" news sites report someone saying something false all the time. They infamously have a problem of citing unnamed government officials, "sources familiar with the matter", etc. to push what, if one wants to stay charitable, can only be described as propaganda. This is even harder to defend from the charge of outright making stuff up than - to compare with examples from the post - Infowars citing a specific, actually existing individual.
This seems like a post on "conflict theory" versus "error theory." Without getting into the minutia of what constitutes a lie, a belief, or other epistemological concerns, it seems like the most important measure of these models is "Which one makes better predictions?"
That is, is "These media actors systematically reports information in predictable ways to advance an agenda," lead to a better model than, "These media actors are relaying information to the best of their ability to construct an accurate model of the world, but through a biased lens from misaligned priors, cognitive dissonance, and other conceptual errors."
It seems like the former model will be vastly better in virtually any possible comparable arena.
I'm largely in favor of the same extensive liberal attitudes Scott is defending here, but I would consider, "We can't tell if people are ideologically biased or if they're intentionally disingenuous," to be a particularly weak point.
I think the point is indeed what you suggest. It is weak as a tool for general media consumption - but is a much stronger point when considering the best case scenarios for censorship, which from the last article seems to Scott’s overarching point.
You can’t draw a clear, objective, live between ideological (or maybe better stated epistemologically) biased and intentional disingenuous in a way a censor (at say a big social media company) could use. The false assumption that I think is being reacted against is the idea you can objectively fact check media. But you if Scott is right the censor probably can’t and would instead either needs to engage more directly with the source material or just engage taking sides.
I think Scott is right in a pendantic sense, and I’m no fan of censorship for the classic liberal reasons, but it seems you could take the approach that has started to emerge of “this article contains references to theories that are likely to be untrue/misleading/contested” with links to more context. It seems like that might be the best we can do.
I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct.
Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't.
Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?
Perhaps that's the real lie. False advertising as to the nature of services provided.
Cassidy Hutchinson testified UNDER OATH that Trump lunged* from the back seat of The Beast and tried to grab the steering wheel! It's not a reporter's job to know if that is physically possible or not, just to report the sworn testimony!
*also, technically she testified that someone e;lse told her this, but oddly enough, that's not how the stories were written.
Not to pick on you particularly, but I'm seeing *a lot* of this sort of thing in the comments here, and it's astounding to me. It feels like the worst parts of Twitter.
This feels like a fair summary of this thread to me::
Scott: The media isn't outright lying, just being misleading.
HW: What about this rape case where they lied?
Scott: They didn't lie in that case, they just reported on lies in a way that was misleading.
You: But isn't it their job not to mislead?
?!?!?! Why do you think "the media isn't doing their job well" is in any way a counter-argument to anything anyone has said here?!
I feel like I'm losing my mind here.
If the reporter knows they are repeating lies and doesn't even believe in the truth of what they are reporting, then we are in Weekly World News territory, and if that is our standard for truth there is no reason to consume any news media ever.
My point here is that Rolling Stone *is* a relatively reliable publication, has proven over the course of its existence that it is a relatively reliable publication and that this one story, probably because the politics of the moment was obsessed with New Feminism, is utter mendacity.
Well, the story the woman made up was fairly implausible. One has to believe that the world is very different than it is to have believed the story was true. I don't believe the reporter believed the story was true.
More importantly, as mentioned, Rolling Stone is known to have good fact checkers yet for some reason decided not to employ them for this this very far-fetched sounding story. I think, for some reason, Rolling Stone editors temporarily took the motto of the old Weekly World News editors, which was "Never question yourself out of a good story."
ETA: Also, this story is not equivalent to the story which simply quoted Rand Paul. The Rolling Stone story was written as if it were true; it wasn't written: "According to her..." this and "According to her..." that.
ETA: The "Almost Famous" scene to which I refer occurs at the end of the movie (spoiler) after the 15-year-old prodigy reporter sends in his story, which is essentially the story of the movie up until then, and Rolling Stone rejects it because their fact checkers are told it was all a lie. It's just a movie, of course, but it was a movie based on writer Cameron Crowe's actual experiences as a writer for Rolling Stone.
ETA: I heard the dictum "Never question yourself out of a good story" espoused by a reporter who was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman in the 90s. Thinking more about it, he may have worked for a British tabloid and not The Weekly World News. His stories tended to be about things like Elvis sightings.
The story contained such implausibilities, and the reporter had such a hard time getting the woman to provide the claimed evidence that would corroborate it (e.g. the dress she alleged she was wearing when she was thrown down on a glass table that shattered under her, raped on top of the broken glass, then went outside to her friends with blood streaming down her back - this dress never was produced at all in the end), and the reporter already had a 'story idea' in mind to do a story about alleged rapes on campus and went looking for someplace that had a good juicy alleged story of such happening, and the editors and everyone steaming right ahead with the story even in the face of any cautions raised - maybe you couldn't call it *direct* lying but it certainly was not, by any measure, objective reporting.
"Woman says she was raped, Rolling Stone believed her" is the best case version. But the truth was more like "Woman says she was raped by demonic entity that appeared out of a giant hole in the ground in the middle of Main Street, no such hole is visible in Main Street, Rolling Stone goes ahead with story anyway".
https://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php
"LAST JULY 8, SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia. Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show “what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,” according to Erdely’s notes of the conversation.
...Jackie proved to be a challenging source. At times, she did not respond to Erdely’s calls, texts and emails. At two points, the reporter feared Jackie might withdraw her cooperation. Also, Jackie refused to provide Erdely the name of the lifeguard who had organized the attack on her. She said she was still afraid of him. That led to tense exchanges between Erdely and Jackie, but the confrontation ended when Rolling Stone’s editors decided to go ahead without knowing the lifeguard’s name or verifying his existence. After that concession, Jackie cooperated fully until publication.
...Rolling Stone’s repudiation of the main narrative in “A Rape on Campus” is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all. The published story glossed over the gaps in the magazine’s reporting by using pseudonyms and by failing to state where important information had come from.
In late March, after a four-month investigation, the Charlottesville, Va., police department said that it had “exhausted all investigative leads” and had concluded, “There is no substantive basis to support the account alleged in the Rolling Stone article.”
...Yet the explanation that Rolling Stone failed because it deferred to a victim cannot adequately account for what went wrong. Erdely’s reporting records and interviews with participants make clear that the magazine did not pursue important reporting paths even when Jackie had made no request that they refrain. The editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie’s position.
...[Erdely] even asked to examine the bloodstained red dress Jackie said she had worn on the night she said she was attacked. ...Eventually, Jackie told Erdely that her mother had thrown away the red dress. She also said that her mother would be willing to talk to Erdely, but the reporter said that when she called and left messages several times, the mother did not respond."
Yeah you are going back a decade to find one imperfect example. Maybe go back further to Stephen Glass at The New Republic, but of course, his level of fabrication was so unusual that a movie was made about the incident.
This just seems like different definitions of lying.
Lying by omission is still lying.
If I go to a Dr because I think I have bladder cancer and am informed that I do not have bladder cancer but the Dr neglects to mention my lung cancer, that's a lie! This is how the media lies. And it does so in every industry (MMA, games, politics) and in almost every story.
Yeh. It’s mostly what they are not telling you.
I think this is semantically wrong. "Lie" is a fairly narrow term; omitting relevant information is usually not lying, even when it's actively deceitful.
If you repeat a lie someone else said as a quote, are you lying? No, but only in the most "technically correct" sense. "Technically correct" is supposed to be the best kind of correct, but maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe "contextually correct" should be the best kind of correct and we should call instances like this lying-by-proxy.
My all-time favourite was getting a reporter to stand outside a building and repeat something so they could say "a source close to Number Ten said...."
There's no denying that the media lies by omission and aligns the facts in misleading ways in order to construct narratives that are ultimately untrue.
So since this entire argument relies on the narrow distinction between "lying" and merely being "dishonest", a more succinct title would have been: The Media Rarely Strays From the Facts
But that headline isn't controversial and wouldn't drive nearly as much engagement now would it? 😏
Do you actually believe that headline wouldn't be controversial?
The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call.
For example this:
"The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black."
was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black."
In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something.
He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male."
There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident.
Don't forget NBC adding pyrotechnics to prove how unsafe a truck was!
This is a deeply disturbing case, and I thank you/SA for letting me know about it.
However, I'd like to quibble about one arguably ironic detail of your description of the malfeasance.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/the-news-vs-i-the-newsroom-i-yes-nbc-did-alter-george-zimmermans-911-call/278566/#:~:text=deleted%20the%20dispatcher%27s%20question%2C%20%22Was%20he%20black%2C%20white%2C%20or%20Hispanic%3F
At least according to this source, Zimmerman had actually said "This guy looks like he's up to no good" shortly before saying "He looks black". The critical and misleading thing was that NBC deleted the dispatcher's question about Travyon's race in between those two statements by Zimmerman, which provided important context for the latter of those 2 statements.
Now, technically, you never explicitly said that they inserted fabricated/inserted "This guy looks like he's up to no good" just before "He looks black", and you certainly didn't intend to convey that. However, the ironic thing here is that, to me, the way you'd written your comment initially gave the impression that the first case had been even more extreme than it was! This is not to say that they (professionals producing national news) were not grievously in the wrong, and it is not to say that your comment was particularly bad.
The second case, where they spliced together several parts of the audio clip into one even more unrepresentative combination, sounds even more egregious, btw. People should've been fired over that sort of malfeasance, but I doubt they got anything more than some embarrassment :(
Scott, I don't think what you're saying about the InfoWars example makes sense. Specifically (https://archives.infowars.com/new-obama-birth-certificate-is-a-forgery/). You say they are not directly lying because they are basing their statement - that the birth certificate is a hoax - on true, yet in truth irrelevant, observations.
My question is, what would directly lying even look like here, if this isn't it? The lie is in the headline - "New Obama Birth Certificate is a Forgery" - and the fact that the supporting 'evidence' has some basis in what one can observe looking at the image seems obvious, because if they said something like "it's a fake because of the bright red space alien in the margins" no one would believe them because no such alien exists.
If they weren't directly lying, they might have made the headline "New Obama Birth Certificate Shows Possible Signs of Being Fake" or something like that.
Another nit. "However, when the government released PDF is taken into the image editing program Adobe Illustrator, we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper..." This is effectively a lie. They may have been mistaken - misled by Illustrator guessing layers, thinking it was authoritative - but the fact that they have avoided issuing any correction at this point suggests to me that they are not merely telling misleading truths and making mistakes.
Some media - the NYT - may mislead far more often than it lies. But InfoWars? This seems to me to be what lying looks like.
Scott has responded convincingly to similar comments above.
I don't think he has. He has not addressed the fact that this factual claim is false.
I think you're contradicting yourself. You acknowledge they could be misled.
Regarding corrections, it is still possible (0.00002%) that it is a forgery. So what you say then?
I was referring to the claim "we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper". These elements do not in fact reveal that, as could be tested by scanning similar documents (or to save time, asking someone at Adobe). So a false claim is being made, which is I think the definition of lying we are using here.
I agree with you that the media has a tendency to present facts that it wants to highlight and direct our focus on, but rarely does it present falsehoods in a clinical sense. But there is more to it. It is able to get quotes from authority figures that align with the way it wants us to think about the story. When it gets quotes from John Brennan and others that the Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian intelligence operation, it is encouraging us to place our trust in that authority figure. How about the media doing it's own digging and finding out? Getting a quote is easy, quick and gives the journalist a cover. Some honest journalist at a lowly rated website or a local paper may end up doing the digging, but he or she doesn't have the reach. The editors at mainstream papers should insist on their own journalists doing the digging instead of lazily getting quotes from authority figures opining freely.
I think that this illustrates that the original question is much less clear cut and admits different interpretations that I would assume.
Consider an article that basically says "Because the sky is blue, we know that the sun is green." Does it lie? I would intuitively say yes, and yet I'd expect you to possibly say no based on examples in this article, because it provides correct facts and incorrect inferences from them. If there's a line of how ludicrous an inference has to be to be considered a lie, then that line is very much in the eye of the beholder, so will be _very_ thick.
I think what a lot of the bad "misinformation" behavior feels like is what has been described as "writing the conclusion first" sort of approach. I don't think it makes sense to imagine that Infowars has the same kind of epistemological commitments that you do. It is just much more parsimonious to believe the site has an intentional stance of misinforming.
This is certainly a matter of degree and one doesn't have to look hard to find NYT content with a quite similar intentional stance. So it isn't like divvying the world up into sinners (believe the opposite of what they say) and saints (believe) is a winning strategy.
My view is that the best thing is for outlets/sites/people to be quite opinionated but to explain those priors and updates honestly. This feels also like it ought to be easy but of course turns out to be hard.
Philosophical question: in real life, have almost *all* “lies” throughout history been technically true statements that merely omitted some crucial context? If so, then should we use the word “lie” only for technically false statements, or for that broader thing? And whichever choice you make: which word should we use for the other thing?
Maybe falsehood or deception?
Almost all lies throughout history have been small children denying that they did a thing everyone watched them do. Lies should only refer to technically false statements, and the broader one is deception, misinformation, misleading, verbal chicanery, horseshit, etc.
"Lie" is much too useful, and too harsh, a word to be wasted on basically harmless things that are almost only ever done by small children. And none of your proposed alternatives are nearly harsh enough to describe people who engage in calculated malicious deception.
"Lie" becomes useless if you gut it of its meaning for some short-term gall bladder bullshit. We don't need another goddamn version of Double Plus Ungood. And why the hell would you assume actual lies are less harmful than deceptions? Scammers tell straight lies and rob people of millions. Jim Jones told straight lies and killed 800 people. What's your super-extra harsh terminology for the people who are worse than the news?
I don't distinguish between scammers who rob people of millions by telling "straight lies", and scammers who rob people of millions by other forms of malicious deception. Or murderous cult leaders, etc. It's the intent and the outcome that matter, not the precise details of the method.
It's the opposite: "lie" is much too useful and too harsh a word to be wasted on a vague category of acts which is obviously capable of stretching to very great lengths. If you apply it to acts in this vague category on the same footing as to actual lying you will no longer have the harshness of "lie" to combat actual lying. Yes, acts in this vague category are often motivated by the same sort of motivations that induce people to lie, and can have similar results, but these are different acts. People who mislead by omission of context still respect truth, and theoretically you can still argue with them about context and shit. People who mislead by telling direct falsehoods don't and arguing with them is meaningless, even counterproductive; you have to escalate to violence of some kind (a lawsuit is one option) to fight them.
I don't much *care* whether we have the harshness of "lie" to refer to saying-literally-false things. Scott's whole *point*, since you seem to be missing it, is that the really damaging misinformation in our society is almost never of that form. But it's still misinformation, resulting from a deliberate and malicious attempt to deceive. I want the harshest language our society can manage for disinformation, applied to the worst sort of disinformation that does the most damage.
It would be disappointing if that means that we're stuck with only a mildly pejorative connotation to the language we use to describe malevolent deceivers. But it doesn't help that there's a stronger word, if that word can only be used against small children and other fools incapable of making their lies really hurt.
You are unwise to not care much about it. Misleading by saying literally false things is much, much more harmful than misleading without saying literally false things. You don't appreciate it because you live in a society where direct lying is suppressed to such an extent that it is not an important contributor to the more general problem of misleading public statements. People from ex-USSR who haven't switched over to putinism could tell you. It's like if you insisted on using the same rules and language for nuclear and non-nuclear weapons because the most damage within living memory (okay, almost within...) has been done by non-nuclear weapons and you didn't want to be stuck with only mildly pejorative connotations of words describing non-nuclear aggression. Scott made the same point in 2016 about calling Trump an "overt white supremacist" etc.
Scott I just wanted to post that I agree with your definition of "lying" for the exact reasoning you describe. If you have a wishy washy definition of lying it lets people Russel conjugate with it. Sticking with a rigid definition, even one that might not cover everything you'd like it to, is the right call here.
I'm curious whether "Sky is blue, therefore sun is green" would be a lie according to your understanding of that definition.
I can't speak for tony but this post rebuts something epistemically very different to what I'd be saying with his words.
When "the media" lies it isn't a shorthand for John A Journalist, human liar. (If that person were lying, it would be their lie, not "the media") An institution lies in a way that every human person involved is more or less telling the truth. Then you wake up in the morning and read the wrong news.
So when you look into 10 cases and say "actually in every case Jane B. Journalist was honestly bamboozled, instead of lying." It's a little like saying "actually in every case the tsunamis were caused by a tidal wave, instead of climate change." Or "actually in every case the applicants were denied due to criminal convictions, instead of racism." What you have discovered with the tidal wave is the end of a long mechanism through which climate change could operate. And so when you turn up the 10 bamboozlings you uncover a way that an institution could lie.
The more interesting question is why you choose to use your space and time for this or that topic. And then compare your motivation to the actual, real-world impact of each post.
Why are you so determined that your readers know precisely how you feel about "trying to reason under uncertainty," while you remain intentionally disinterested in the overall impact of the piece, which is to minimize focus on malicious intent (on pedantic grounds), and to promote both-sides-ism? Why take up so much bandwidth for such small, misleading points? At best, it's suited to happy hour at a bar, where listeners could heartily agree that the Times and InfoWar exist on the same planet (which was your cutesy provocation here). It's Fox News' bread and butter: spending all their finite airtime on provocative perspectives based on magnifying small stances (like immigration or wokeness) beyond all reasonable recognition. As we all know by now, it's a good profit model in 2022 America, but that alone doesn't make it useful.
To paraphrase Heinlein in Logic of Empire (and abut Hanlon elsewhere): They have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
You don't think headlines count? "FBI SAYS NO ONE KILLED AT SANDY HOOK" is an outright, complete lie. Even _if_ the main text then perhaps attempts to quote sources.
I know we're being trained by the media to assume that every headline everywhere is complete nonsense that we should ignore, but that doesn't really change anything.
> "FBI SAYS NO ONE KILLED AT SANDY HOOK" is an outright, complete lie. Even _if_ the main text then perhaps attempts to quote sources.
Did you not read that section of the post? The quoted source was the FBI saying there were zero deaths at Sandy Hook.
No, they had a recording system that recorded the deaths under a different header. The headline is still a total lie.
I haven't read all the comments, but I assume we're just debating whether willingly reporting obvious lies from others is the same as lying.
Some are doing that. Some are asserting that the right/left-wing Jewish/Nazi-controlled Koch/Soros-funded journaLIEsts are OBVIOUSLY lying all the time. Some are completely missing the point.
There is a lot of overlap.
Brilliant post. This bell needs to be rung with the biggest hammer and from the highest hill before it’s too late.
I think many of the outright lies don't show up in news sources, they show up in facebook memes that start off on a page called "Patriot news" or something like that.
(I'm using a right wing Facebook page as an example here, since that's what I'm more familiar with, but I'm pretty sure this also applies to some non-journalist left wing twitter accounts, with a slightly different pattern.)
The meme says something like "WHY are we locking down the country and DESTROYING the ECONOMY for a virus that is LESS DEADLY than the FLU? LIKE and SHARE if you AGREE!"
Then it gets shared within an echo chamber of people who already believe that particular lie, and then people outside the echo chamber see it and are horrified at it.
Probably many of these posts are produced by people without better things to do, but some of them I believe are likely generated by bots. There's just too many of them, and some of the more formulaic ones make no sense, like the ones that have a picture of a nativity scene and the text "Facebook BANNED somebody for posting this. Are you BRAVE enough to LIKE and SHARE?"
In the past few years, Facebook puts a little "Fact-Checked: False" notification on top of or under some of the blatantly false posts. Which is
A) Could be considered censorship of a certain kind, which is bad on principle
B) More likely to make the people already sharing that post to dig their heels in and double down on the idea shared in the post.
C) now the people who posted it feel like they are being persecuted.
Great, exactly what the national discourse needed!
I've also heard family members who regularly share political memes tell me they've actually received short bans from facebook.
Sometimes, a post like "Donald Trump is Superman!" will get the little "fact-checked" badge on it, along with a little blurb that says "Donald Trump is not superman, according to experts" or something. Facebook seems to regularly fact-check things that are obviously right-wing political jokes, and not meant to be taken seriously. The most egregious example was when facebook put a link to vaccine information on a Babylon bee article called "Playgrounds these days are too safe" because the article happened to mention vaccines in passing. The fictional author of the satire piece complained that everybody is too scared to step outside their door without three vaccines, whereas back in HIS day playgrounds were coated in broken glass. Slightly critical of vaccine obsession? Yeah. Spreading misinformation? Not at all.
I think that the fact-checking that has been happening on Facebook, and possibly other social media sites, is actually making things worse by making people lose all trust in Facebook and the sources from which items are fact-checked. Who is going to believe the CDC if their logo appears as part of a fact-check below a babylon bee post?
The approach to "fake news" taken by social media sites and others who wish for fact checking or censorship is entirely counterproductive, in my opinion. I think if there's a bunch of lies going around, the problem is more fundamental than just righting some wrongs on facebook.
I am really curious about how conversations that take place on social media are different than the conversations that happen in-person. Usually, when I have an in-person conversation with somebody that I also follow on Facebook, they seem a lot more reasonable than the do online, although a few people I have talked to end up using meme-like talking points.
I realize at this point that this comment has strayed a little from the topic of the post, but I think it's related regarding arguments for censorship that really aren't solid.
One distinction that's *really, really* important to make here is between article content and headlines. Yes, news articles themselves very rarely give outright lies. But headlines are a different story. For instance, the Obama birth certificate article you mentioned doesn't directly lie, but the headline "NEW OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE IS A FORGERY" is an outright lie! Perhaps a lie motivated by honest skepticism, but nonetheless a lie. This applies to other media outlets like the NYT and Fox, not just infowars of course. There is strong incentive for headlines to optimize for clicks, and most people only read headlines, and never the main body of a given article (you can see this happen all the time on Twitter), so lies often spread in this way, even if the text of the articles are properly nuanced.
I think the reaction to your articles is probably going to depend in part on whether people find the distinction useful. I personally do - I think it's good to know that I can read most articles and assume that it's telling me some true things, that I just need to watch out how it's worded and think seriously about what it's omitting. If I use "lying" to mean "is misleading by stretching the presented facts in particular way" *and* "is actually making up facts", and the concept actually merges in my head, then I would have to stop reading articles and couldn't use them as a source of any sort of information.
I'm reasonably sure the people who call both things "lying" are, however, still making that distinction in their head, they just don't find it useful to split out the word itself, because it *also* has the use that it can be used to warn someone away from a source, or condemn someone for bad journalism. One can certainly just say "bad journalism" (or "misleading") for it, but it doesn't pack quite the same punch, and I understand, to some degree, why people would want a word that hits harder for something that can indeed be deeply manipulative.
On net, it's probably valuable to warn more people about how misleading journalism often is. If they don't already know it, using the word "lying" is probably going to be more accessible to convey the magnitude of the problem. (On the flip side, you might make people outright paranoid and they might start to worry about the amount of actual baseline fabrications. My gut feelings says that's probably worse than getting someone to be well-calibrated about their media scepticism, mostly for reasons of social cohesion (if you think people are intentionally lying to your face on a regular basis, I'm reasonably sure it'll make you cynical), but I could be wrong about that.)
Anyway, to reiterate, I find the distinction between "being misleading" and "lying" useful in my model of the world. So thanks for sticking with the narrative!
"However, when the government released PDF is taken into the image editing program Adobe Illustrator, we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper, as one might surmise."
This sentence is incorrect; those separate elements do not reveal the document to not be a single scan on paper.
Thank you for writing this. I had previously thought that InfoWars & co did intentionally write unambiguous fiction, rather than publishing true things leading readers to incorrect conclusions. The distinction is important.
(Admittedly, this post did raise my estimation of the likelihood that some popular conspiracy theories are true, much like "The Control Group is Out of Control" made me less sure that pseudoscience was all false, and "The Cowpox of Doubt" made me less sure about fringe positions in general. I'd be interested in a general analysis of "how sure should we really be that the crazies are wrong?" and also "why is it so common for random false things to have convincing collections of evidence for them just lying around for anyone to gather and spread?", but I realize this may be a very broad topic.)
I'm finding the conversation here and in the subreddit quite frustrating. However, it might be that Scott worded his article badly enough to generate this amount of disagreement or it might be that I am wrong in my interpretation of the articles.
Here is what I take from the two articles:
1. Censorship is extremely hard because separating those who intend to deceive from those who simply err is difficult to do in a rigorous way (i.e. rigorous as opposed to using "judgment calls")
2. This is because, counter-factually, censorship would be easy if bad actors in the media (a) plainly reported miss-truths. But they almost never do this. They instead (b) report true facts, selectively, and then draw inferences from those facts.
People responded with lots of examples of what they took to be (a) and this second post was Scott demonstrating that they were in fact examples of (b) all along (allowing for a few true examples of a)
How can we separate examples of (b) into the set of those intending to deceive and those who err. One way is to some how find out whether they they didn't really believe their stated inferences when they printed them. This seems very hard and I guess what long complicated liable cases look like?
We may discover communications that show the reporters in question selectively hid information in order to argue for a predetermined inference. However, this is also difficult as there then needs to be some standard of due diligence. That is, at what point is it considered misconduct to not seek or report the counter evidence? In fact we have already run into problems with this by tilting entirely the other way and having climate change deniers or homeopaths sit next to actual scientists in order to show "balance" which creates the perception of controversy or scientific disagreement when there is none.
So it seems to me the point of the article is well made. In summary, media censorship is hard because "lies", defined in a way that would make censorship work, would fail to capture all the things that in an ideal world we would wish to it to capture. Alternatively, we lack the means to censor "lies" when it is defined more broadly (and more comfortably) as the intention to deceive.
I think you are broadly correct in your interpretation. I don't think either article was poorly worded, but there is absolutely a frustrating combination of poor reading comprehension and motivated reasoning going on in the comments.
I'm finding the conversation here and in the subreddit quite frustrating. However, it might be that Scott worded his article badly enough to generate this amount of disagreement or it might be that I am wrong in my interpretation of the articles.
Here is what I take from the two articles:
1. Censorship is extremely hard because separating those who intend to deceive from those who simply err is difficult to do in a rigorous way (i.e. rigorous as opposed to using "judgment calls")
2. This is because, counter-factually, censorship would be easy if bad actors in the media (a) plainly reported miss-truths. But they almost never do this. They instead (b) report true facts, selectively, and then draw inferences from those facts.
People responded with lots of examples of what they took to be (a) and this second post was Scott demonstrating that they were in fact examples of (b) all along (allowing for a few true examples of a)
How can we separate examples of (b) into the set of those intending to deceive and those who err. One way is to somehow find out whether they they didn't really believe their stated inferences when they printed them. This seems very hard and I guess what long complicated liable cases look like?
Another is discovering communications that show the reporters in question selectively hid information in order to argue for a predetermined inference. This is also problematic as there then needs to be some standard of due diligence. That is, at what point is it considered misconduct to not seek or report the counter evidence? In fact we have already run into problems with this by tilting entirely the other way and having climate change deniers or homeopaths sit next to actual scientists in order to show "balance" which creates the perception of controversy or scientific disagreement when there is none.
So it seems to me the point of the article is well made. In summary, media censorship is hard because "lies" defined in a way that would make censorship work, would fail to capture all the things that in an ideal world we would wish to it to capture. Alternatively, we lack the means to censor "lies" when it is defined more broadly (and more comfortably) as the intention to deceive.
Yes! This is a helpful way of framing it.
Thank you. This is more or less my interpretation of Scott's point and that a lot of comments have gotten bogged down into "is this a lie or not?" while losing the larger point that regardless of what we call the misinformation we don't like, it is highly problematic and far from straightforward to find a way to eliminate it in a public policy way.
Norms of good journalism can be articulated and upheld, the public can get more savvy about what good journalism looks like and support it... but it's hard to see what kinds of government action would make a substantial difference here.
Not that I'm the first person to notice this, but when a newspaper has a strong ideological slant, they'll tend to take a nuanced, carefully researched article, and give it a title like "The Left Is LYING About X" or "Proof That Republicans Are WRONG About Y". They'll also often lie by omission or suggest something untrue through implication or innuendo.
So, yes, I agree that it's very hard to catch the media in an outright lie, and it's probably impossible to effectively regulate misinformation without throwing out the first amendment, and quite possibly ending up censoring perfectly true information the government doesn't like. I considered all this obvious but maybe that was overly optimistic of me.
I guess where I disagree is that there seems to be a false dichotomy here between "the media is literally telling lies" and "the media is just trying to reason under uncertainty." If someone deliberately tries to deceive me, I'm comfortable declaring them Evil and/or Dumb, even if no individual sentence can quite be technically considered a lie.
Do people even make concert claims at all when talking sophist-icated?
You started with "2020 stolen election".
Trump was the one that lead the stolen election claims, not the media. And Trump definitely told some outright lies about it. I documented a few of them, at the time:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/the-only-fraud-is-in-the-white-house-16f6786ac837
Trump tweeted things like, "In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!"
(None of that was true)
Or: "The Great State of Michigan, with votes being far greater than the number of people who voted, cannot certify the election. The Democrats cheated big time, and got caught. A Republican WIN!"
(Also, not true)
Or: "In certain swing states, there were more votes than people who voted, and in big numbers. Does that not really matter? Stopping Poll Watchers, voting for unsuspecting people, fake ballots and so much more. Such egregious conduct. We will win!"
(Not true in any state)
There were a lot of other less obvious lies. Trump said that dead people voted. He pointed to vote dumps as big cities reported. He claimed that Dominion is running the election. None of that really held up if you looked into it, but it's not quite as easy to demonstrate that the claims were false.
I don't have a record of everything Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell said at press conferences. I would imagine you can find blatant lies in that, especially since they walked it all back in court because they didn't want to lie under oath. And then there was some kind of show hearing in Pennsylvania where people weren't under oath and made up whatever claims they wanted.
So, none of that is "the media lying", it's just Trump and his lawyers lying. Then the media repeated some parts of it and most conservatives jumped on board in believing the election was rigged in some more or less subtle way.
I'm not sure if there's archived video to search, but I would imagine I could also find outright lies about the election on Newsmax or OANN. I recall they brought Ron Watkins (the guy who is most likely Q) on as some kind of analyst talking about Dominion machines. I would guess that segment was less than truthful.
You're trying to argue that everyone just operates on confirmation bias and no one is "DUMB AND EVIL".
In Trump's case, it's easy to see that he is either EVIL, for blatantly lying about vote counts, or DUMB, for not knowing that he's lying about these.
And you can tell it's a pattern, because he said the same things when Ted Cruz beat him in Iowa.
I think there's a way in which rationalists act like useful idiots, when it comes to these things. Like, after Trump started calling the election fraudulent, we all just started crunching numbers to try to prove it one way or another.
But his game is just to frame what's being talked about. He wants to yell "STOLEN ELECTION!" enough times that dumb people believe that it was stolen. Working through the numbers and litigating the facts just shows that it's being discussed. People too dumb to follow the arguments just see that it's a valid question whether the election was stolen or not.
The same is probably true of your second claim about vaccine deaths. Debunking most anti-vax arguments is easy. But if you get enough people debating vaccine safety, a lot of people just notice that everyone's talking about vaccine safety, and therefore many people think vaccine safety is highly questionable.
The individual claims about vaccines range everywhere from outright fabrications, to intentional misinterpretation of data, to actual safety concerns. Every anti-vaxxer has a different strategy, many of the ones with largest audiences toe the line of allowed speech by finding suspicious but real datapoints or by "just asking questions" without explicitly stating things. Steve Kirsch is most definitely a bad faith actor, not someone who accidentally misinterpreted one poll about vaccine deaths.
It's useful to ask what an information source sees its job as being. One job might be to inform me--to give me an accurate picture of the world. Another might be to give me enough background and context to put together my own accurate picture of the world, or to at least notice the shaky bits of their picture of the world. Another goal might be to entertain me. Another might be to flatter my prejudices. Another might be to convince me to do what they think I should do (vote the right way, get vaccinated, etc.). Another might be to show themselves to be on the right side of some set of issues to other people who are important to them.
I care a lot about the first two jobs, some about the third (more entertaining is better than less entertaining, all else equal) and consider the rest of those jobs as negatives--I'd rather have a news source that spends zero effort flattering my prejudices, convincing me to act as they think best, or signaling their position on the right side of history.
I am especially not interested in news sources that feel obliged to omit relevant information because it might have bad social effects--say, being unwilling to speak ill of Ukraine now that they're fighting a way against Russia.
You write:
“I don’t worry about these questions too much *because I’m not a conspiracy theorist*. It seems much more likely that the FBI does its crime reports in a weird way, or that there’s some good explanation for the lack of trauma helicopters, than that the government faked an entire school shooting for some bizarre reason.
But this is a judgment call on my part (an obviously correct judgment call, but a judgment call nevertheless). *A crazy person* could see those same facts and decide it was more likely that the government faked a school shooting than that there would be a real school shooting that no trauma helicopters came to. I don’t know why they would think that, but empirically sometimes they do.“
Asserting that you made the judgment calls you did because you were neither 1) “a conspiracy theorist” nor 2) a “crazy person”.
How would we know either is true? How many conspiracy theorists think of themselves as “conspiracy theorists”? How many crazy people self identify as “crazy people”?
At least some conspiracy theories turn out to be true in some form. I mean, "The CIA is running a network of secret prisoners where people kidnapped off the streets of random cities all over the world are taken and tortured" sounds like something you'd hear from your favorite anti-government conspiracy type, but it actually happened and ended up in the newspapers. Similarly, "9/11 was an inside job" is a common (and pretty clearly wrong) conspiracy theory, but the anthrax mailings are alleged to have come from a US bioweapons researcher who committed suicide right before he was to be charged in the attacks. (Though it has never been clear to me if this means he really was the guy, or just that after his suicide the FBI agents in charge of the case saw an easy way to close the case with no inconvenient defendant to contradict them.)
Surrounding this is a huge cloud of utterly nuts conspiracy theories, and movie-plot conspiracies that probably couldn't really work, and weird stories that go around and sometimes get signal-boosted by opportunists, or whatever. And also real conspiracies, but the real ones are probably more like some dude on the county sewer commission getting payoffs from his brother in law who owns a construction company.
Considering the number of people the FBI falsely accused of being the anthrax mailer, I see no reason to believe their most recent accusation.
I believe the number is two, but the point still stands. FBI says "this definitely wasn't a terrorist attack or conspiracy, it was one nutty bioweapons researcher. This one, right here, and we're going to run him through a living hell until he confesses". Specified bioweapons researcher proves his innocence well enough to win a lawsuit against several of his accusers. FBI says "this definitely wasn't a terrorist attack or conspiracy, it was one nutty bioweapons researcher. This one, right here, and we're going to run him through a living hell until he confesses". This time the specified bioweapons researcher fails to prove his innocence, and commits suicide. FBI says "see, we told you so".
Whatever your initial prior, the appropriate update after the first false accusation should have you *extremely* skeptical of the second basically identical accusation.
I agree that the media tends to reports facts selectively and out of context rather than outright fabricating stuff. However, I don’t see a big difference between the two. One can take almost any sufficiently complicated story and report/interpret truthfully but selectively and out of context to get the message one wishes to get. I don’t think that the additional constraint “doesn’t make stuff up” would add much in terms of influencing readers in one direction or another.
Interestingly enough, nobody mentioned the whole campaign of presenting Trump as "Russian asset" and treating every little detail in his behavior as a proof of that. Which, unlike Infowars, earned a special prosecutor and significantly influenced US politics.
My favorite in all that was a spectacular Alfabank story, where some "security researchers", some of them the same one tasked with security Trump's communications, worked with opposing campaign to concoct a narrative that Trump is secretly communicating with Russians, did use Trump's communication logs for it (which are supposed to be private but as far as I know no consequences for that egregious breach of professional ethics and privacy to anyone) and those logs showed some marketing spam from Trump org's domain going, among myriad other places, to some Alfabank-related servers (where it almost certainly was buried by spam filters, but maybe some annoyed Alfabank IT person actually read it before). Out of these, the conspiracy story was blown up and I still encountered references to it as a true story as late as end of 2021. Were any of the press outlets pushing this "lying" about the facts? They certainly published many false statements, but they could be likely attributed to opinions or quoting people that lied to them, or something like that. So, no lies here.
Or take the Biden laptop story. FBI knew it's genuine - they had it in their hands. When the New York Post story broke out, the press outlets that didn't treat it with deadly silence wrote that 9000 "intelligence sources" told them it bears "classic marks of Russian disinformation". Were they lying? Probably not - we now know that FBI/CIA/OGA/whatever other TLA led a campaign of "warning people against Russian disinformation" which strongly hinted and this particular story. But they didn't even name it directly! And certainly poor journalists couldn't know it's true when Other Government Agency tells them it's "classical marks"! And that maybe isn't a lie too - the story could be true but "look" like it's false, and if you say "it looks like it's false" while knowing it's true but not mentioning it - are you lying?
So (almost) nobody lied, and yet the truth was successfully hidden and the lie was successfully propagated. Funny how it works.
I too found this interesting.
I think I figured out my confusion. Scott says, “although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context”. In doing so, he distinguishes between intentionally false facts and misleading articles containing true facts.
However, drawing on what others have said, there are more possibilities than these, and I found it helpful to think in terms of the following categories:
1. Knowingly false statements, i.e. lies. Scott is correct in my view to restrict the concept of the ‘lie’ to this category, and this accords with its traditional meaning. As a general point, it is often very difficult for a well-informed recipient to be sure that such a statement is a lie, because the recipient does not have direct access to the thoughts and beliefs of the speaker. An in-depth investigation into the speaker and their circumstances may be needed to decide that they were lying, e.g. a fraud investigation and trial.
2. Unintentional false statements, based on presented true evidence. Giving Infowars some benefit of the doubt, this seems to be what a lot of the articles cited by Scott amount to. The articles themselves contain a number of false statements (e.g. that Obama’s birth certificate is fake), as well as many true statements as ‘evidence’ (about white lines on a PDF etc), and it is plausible that the false statements are based on genuinely believed, if fanciful, inferences from the evidence. The blameworthiness of a statement in this category should depend partly on how negligent or reckless the person making it was.
3. Unintentional false statements, without presenting evidence. This is what you get if you state your false belief without presenting the evidence that led you to it, for reasons of space or otherwise. My impression is that this is the nature of a lot of what the mainstream media referred to as Trump’s ‘lies’. Trump would boldly state something false about immigration or election results in a speech or tweet; if he believed it (which I suspect he usually did) he wasn’t really lying.
4. Articles comprising entirely true statements that, due to selection and omission, together give a misleading impression. This is distinguished from the previous categories because it doesn’t involve saying anything that is explicitly false, e.g. an article that just presenting various statements along the lines of ‘Dr Expert says that Obama’s birth certificate looks suspicious’ or ‘Obama’s birth certificate shows up funny in Adobe Illustrator’ as opposed to headlining an article with a false statement that ‘Obama’s birth certificate is fake’. This is what we mean when we say that an article is misleading, even if it doesn’t contain any actual false statements.
I believe that Scott is correct that lies (category 1) are very rare in the media – both mainstream and Infowars-level ‘alternative’. 2 is more common, but moreso for something like Infowars than mainstream media. My impression is that 4 is common in mainstream media, and my initial feeling was that this might sometimes be worse than 2. Whereas the author of 2 is simply mistaken, 4 seems to imply that the author knows there is a false statement that they can’t make, and is scrupulously avoiding it, but still wants to lead the reader into believing a falsehood anyway.
I need to think more about how all this maps on to the concept of ‘misinformation’ or what it is feasible or desirable to ‘censor’.
What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis.
They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?"
I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much.
In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece.
That's not true. I mean, did you ever read it? Obviously they were not all straight reported stories, come on. To get it from the horse's mouth, look at https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/626827/weekly-world-news-bat-boy-oral-history where they discuss how in the first issues they did try to hew strictly to factual stories but then very rapidly began doing wholesale unabashed explicit fiction writing with as much offbeat news as they could find to maintain the fiction of nonfiction reporting and keep it entertaining, which is of course the same thing InfoWars or Fox or the Macedonian trolls will do (but more for evil). There was certainly not 'always had sources'; a small fraction did. Eg as the ex-WWN writers describe the early period:
> Ivone: We tiptoed into fiction. We’d exaggerate now and then, and then exaggerate more, as we went through newspapers and magazines. “This is a good story, it’s already covered, but what would make it more compelling? What would yield the most compelling headline?” That’s how we got into thinking about this imaginary world with recurring characters, like Bat Boy, Bigfoot, aliens, and all the rest.
>
> Lind: We wrote these things straight, for people who wanted to believe these things. We wrote it like a news story. We wrote a lede with a dash in it, filled it in, and then had a money quote.
>
> Ivone: It was an incremental process. We didn’t fight it. We were being rewarded by readers.
>
> Lind: We didn’t make all of it up. A lot of them were true stories.
>
> Ivone: We used “borrowed credibility.” On the left-hand side, there were stories people recognized, and then there were the more outlandish, mythical, urban legends on the right side. It was all juxtaposed with recognizable, legitimate stories to get readers to think about it. “This is true, this farmer in Idaho saying his wife ran away with Bigfoot.” It’s given a little bit of credibility, a platform to give people permission to believe it.
>
> ...Ideas weren’t solely a result of imagination. The staff of Weekly World News would hear from readers and even called up legitimate sources to help validate their fables.
>
> ...Kupperberg: The fact that we were able to sit around and make up a new world every week was an amazing thing. And they paid us for it.
etc
Do you disagree with the Texas Court of Appeals in its decision denying Alex Jones’s Motion to Dismiss?
“The April 22 broadcast contained direct false assertions of facts implying that the parents colluded in what Appellants cast as a hoax relating to the murder of their son, as well as a whirlwind of other statements that, according to Jones, ‘all tie[] together’ and relate to the shooting at Sandy Hook.”
https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/third-court-of-appeals/2019/03-18-00603-cv.html
I would like to suggest that, in contemporary American English, "X Important Person On Our Team Says Y" means "Y Is Definitely True", the only difference being that the former includes a ceremonial formula that indicates the class and role of the institution. The "citing sources" formula is widely understood to mean, along with much other context, that the institution performing it has selected the most important facts for inclusion in the article, that they do meaningfully contribute to the article's conclusion and that the conclusion is therefore trustworthy.
That's all context that comes along with something being a news article. Nobody gets to write news articles apart from it. Most people understand the Fox article to be a truth claim about the election, not a truth claim about what specific thing Ron Paul did or didn't say. So that's what it means, and it is, in fact, a lie.
Correctly performing the ceremony of finding a source to say the lie they want to tell and citing it in official journalist language does give them official immunity from having lied. The official and the ceremonial are closely linked. But it doesn't give them any moral or reputational immunity.
Scott and the commenters agree about the moral and reputational cost these dishonest institutions should bear; it's really a disagreement about the semantics of the word "to lie".
While I agree there's a definitional disagreement about "lie", I gather Scott's larger point is criticizing simplistic thinking about how to stop misinformation in the media. I don't know who the specific simplistic thinkers are in this instance, but the critique is clear enough.
You're right. Hmmm. I'm not sure about this, but I think I disagree with Scott about whether this kind of deception is cut and dry. In the case of individuals, there's a lot of gray area, and there are a lot of cases where somebody might seem to be lying, but really they're trying their best. But big institutions like Fox or the Washington Post have fact checkers, and are expected to have fact checkers. When we read them, we're right to expect them to include relevant details. When they lie in the way we're talking about here, it could, in all practicality, be adjudicated by a fair and objective censorship board of some kind, in basically the way Scott is saying can't be done. Because the Washington Post and Fox should know better, and they do know better, and so it's not impractical to hold them to a higher standard than a tabloid or a random individual.
(I don't think a censorship board is a good idea. I just don't believe in this particular barrier to implementation in the case of big institutions.)
I was interested to hear when Musk took over Twitter and started firing people that the EU regulators in Ireland had rules about what kind of internal oversight staff Twitter needed to have relative to security in order to be allowed to operate in the EU zone. So it seems like their way of addressing this kind of thing is to have standards about staffing in a media platform. One could imagine regulators requiring a news outlet to have X number of fact checkers per total staff or something to ensure that an outlet is at least providing for the possibility of fact checking.
Okay, but people aspiring to be rational need to recognize this pattern and not buy the "the guy who said this is high status to my tribe so his words must be true" thing, right?
Yeah, of course.
Thanks for responding publicly.
I still think you are missing many examples.
For the lying about the election:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/25/trump-team-fox-news-alleged-dead-voters-most-cases-were-either-debunked-or-actually-involved-republicans/
Or
https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/fox-news-anchor-grossly-misleads-about-voters-who-died-michigan
I can find many more.
You are moving the goalposts in the comments, because now you are saying that making a factually false assertion doesn't count as lying being you might honestly believe it. But then what does count as lying? Any lie can simply be rebuffed by saying that the person telling honestly believed it. Even when the person themselves admits that they didn't believe it's, you say it's still possible that they weren't being honest when they admitted that they were intentionally lying.
Moreover, yes I agree the media frequently avoids "lying" by simply quoting someone else who is lying. I don't see why choosing to quote someone who you know is lying without saying that they are lying doesn't count as lying. You are conveying to people an assertion that is not true. That seems indistinguishable from lying.
The best definition of a lie I've encountered is:
"Communicating something you believe is false with the intent of deceiving the other person, without their consent".
If you believe something is true you can't purposefully be deceiving someone because you are communicating what you believe to be the truth.
Some years ago I went to an actual conspiracy theory *convention*, in the Bay Area, and it’s interesting to think about how the cases were presented, unfiltered by external media, in the light of what Scott says.
The theories did mainly rely on making very unlikely inferences from misleadingly-contextualised true facts, rather than just inventing the evidence itself (at least, as far as I could tell).
There was obviously a whole bunch of completely made-up stuff, such as Barack Obama literally being Tutankhamen… but it was on the level of overarching narrative. They presented seemingly factual evidence - such as Obama appearing in the same photograph as a pyramid-shaped thing - and then extrapolated from them to insinuate or sometimes baldly claim fantastical happenings.
At one one point there was a photo of people in Dallas (supposedly) on the morning of the JFK assassination, and the speaker pointed to a blurry man who didn’t look particularly like George W Bush, and said “Here you can see the 17-year-old George W Bush”, who he then accused of murdering JFK for some complicated reason.
The extremely unpleasant Sandy Hook conspiracy woman put up photos of the kids killed at the school alongside photos of some child actors from 1980s (or maybe 90s) adverts who looked pretty different to me, and then just stated that they were the same children.
Where there might have been a lot of false evidence was in the 9/11 lecture and the “Israelis control the weather and use this power primarily to cause storms in the Caribbean for some reason” lecture, because those lectures absolutely avalanched us with often very technical data, which I had no way of assessing and couldn’t concentrate on anyway because it was so tedious. But my guess is that they were probably also not straightforwardly false.
I wish you had at least commented on "Trump was scheming with the Russians in the 2016 election" hoax.
I'm surprised there has been so much push back on this idea Scott, and the fact that it is non-trivial to find example of outright fabrication goes to show just how much fabrication is not the main problem. It also I think points to the fact that it is tempting to demonize the 'opposition' as evil, whereas the reality is far scarier; what you believe vs disbelieve is more predicated on you upbringing and social context than any kernel or morality or intellect.
I am fairly sure that had I been adopted by Trump-voting-antivax-NRA-members parents I would hold very different views and believe very different narratives.
What's even more interesting is that it is not that falsehood is just pushed one layer down. The sources media uses to push a narrative that suits them, are also, more often than not, themselves built upon mostly-true stuff.
It is mostly true (turtles) all the away down.
I've been thinking this for years, and for this reason one of my defences against falling to misinformation is to read what the text literally says, and no more. To me, as a reader, the distinction between "claim X" and "person Y makes claim X" is significant, but I've always felt in a stark minority. Of course I would much prefer it if media (and others) didn't blindly regurgitate when "person Y makes claim X", but at least when it happens, I can avoid the trap of just reading "claim X". Thanks for writing this up.
A neat explanation of why older people are less likely to changr their minds and why conspiracy theories are nigh impossible to convince: Bayesian reasoning is basically blockchain with how it's used in practice.
Start with a wrong prior, and if you update enough with the wrong kind of information, you'll start believing your chain of reasoning is longer and more established, and reject any information that doesn't build on top of your chain.
Providing an alternative explanation one link in the chain isn't enough because it doesn't invalidate all the other reasoning that has been built on top of it. You'd need a correct chain of reasoning as long as their entire incorrect chain of reasoning to be convincing enough.
That doesn't mean that conspiracy theoriests will add outright false evidence or incorrect reasoning to their chain, it still has to make sense, they just honestly don't believe in alternative interpretations because to them, their interpretation has already been justified a hundred times over.
>(if a statistics expert wants to write a really comprehensive analysis of their results, I would be interested and maybe willing to publish it)
I was thinking of taking you up on this, but the appendix for reproducing their results is missing. (https://gofile.io/d/mHC6JX) Unfortunately, I can't find a mirror of this appendix. Does anyone have a copy? The SHA256 hash is fc1d9e17fc831e288609099e290f4d0152918f6365e7a602f7bd37dbe5347546.
I'd guess writing to Vote Pattern Analysis would be the best way to get hold of it.
Two things on info wars
1. The main things Alex Jones was accused about in court were things he said on his show not articles on the website. He says more inflammatory and directly false things in the show. I think this is a general pattern, where people are less likely to directly lie in print because it's easier to get caught, and penalties are potentially higher (because it requires prenedirarion and you can't argue that you misspoke or were misunderstood).
2. On the article you give as an example, aren't they directly lying when they say he's a "school safety expert"? That's not a statement about what he calls himself, but a fact claim. Even though there's no official definition of the term the way there would be for say doctor that's still a deliberate lie.
>aren't they directly lying when they say he's a "school safety expert"?
Maybe (don't know, didn't check) but I don't think anyone is claiming that "The media never lies". If this is the biggest lie we can collectively come up with in this story, then this support Scott's point I would think.
a) it seems a pretty big deal, since a large part of journalism is presenting the views of experts to the public, since journalists aren't domain experts in everything. So falsely representing who is an expert is a major problem and an easy way of lying. It's making a claim about the credibility of the state that is false. If the identity is not relevant than there would be no difference between "school safety expert says..." and "homeless man we found in the park says..." but there clearly is.
b) the whole point of this article is about what is technically lies or not in a very strict sense. The question of how significant they are is separate
Well, Scott's post is titled "The Media Very Rarely Lies." If you need to go to an article that I think most folk would agree is many standard deviations from what would be considered "average media" and within it identify them labeling someone with a vague title "school safety expert" to, presumably, contend that Scott's claim is false (thus "The media NOT very rarely lies") it feels to me that this still firmly sits within the definition of "very rarely".
Anecdote: my mother, a retired academic, went to a conference where they had to put something on her badge. She didn't have an institution any more. She said, "Ok, put `Freelance academic` on there." And they did.
Maybe that is what happened here also?
Scott's point is less about what is technically lies or not than the argument that what we point at when we say the media is lying is not as easily actionable as many people's rhetoric suggests.
He wrote below: "My point is that - as you also say - media has to choose which experts to profile. If you're an insane conspiracy theorist, you will naturally choose to profile insane conspiracy theorist experts (who you think are right), and if you're an establishment stooge, you will naturally choose to profile establishment stooge experts (who you think are right), and if a censor chooses to ban one side rather than the other, they'll be banning them not for "lying" but for having the opinions they have and following the consequences of those opinions."
People describe themselves as experts all the time. If there isn't a claimed credential involved, it's not a clear lie, right? I mean, a bunch of online misinformation experts got quoted in media and invited to testify in Congress. How would you demonstrate your expertise here? It's not like there's some kind of certification program.
As i said in the previous post most propaganda is not telling you something, not investigating something, or not allowing discussion about something. How many Americans know the war in Yemen?
Even if US papers are telling the truth, they are certainly not telling the whole truth.
A lot of the news is deciding what is and isn't news. Is an angry mob at a college somewhere shutting down an invited speaker news? Is it news when an American drone-fired missile blows up a wedding party in Afghanistan by mistake? When an illegal immigrant kills someone in a DUI wreck? When some high school kids spray paint a swastika on the front door of the school?
Depending on your desired narrative, any or none of those might be news.
Deciding what is news is mostly propaganda.
At some point, the media has to decide which events deserve attention. Otherwise, the media would be obliged to report on the state of every grain of sand on the beach.
That’s an argument to the extremes.
I think the author of this article is operating under a fundamentally different definition of "lying" than I am, and perhaps an entirely different meaning of what language is.
Lying is making statements with the intention to deceive. It does not matter to me that the statements are "technically true" under some particular framing of the facts. The purpose of language is to communicate beliefs from one person to another.
Consider 3 parties: Alex, Bridget and Chad. Alex publishes a series of statements on mass media intended for Chad. Alex knows and intends that this message will convince Chad that Sandy Hook was a hoax. Bridget is a "fact checker" who independently observes the communications between Alex and Chad, and is able to squint and say, well, under certain assumptions and terminology, evaluating the list of statements individually Alex is technically not stating any incorrect facts. That is entirely besides the point!
Alex made statements with the intention to deceive, and KNEW that Chad would be deceived. Chad likewise received these statements and now believes that Sandy Hook is a hoax, as was intended!
This is lying. It doesn't matter if the lying is indirect, through misinterpreting statistics, or poorly worded questions on surveys. It is lying, and could potentially even be fraud, if innocent bystanders were harmed by the lie.
And in the Sandy Hook, Alex Jones case, the law agrees with my definition. Despite all of Alex Jones' prevarication on the stand, a court found Alex Jones and Infowars liable for his deceptions:
In August, a jury awarded Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages against Jones for spreading a conspiracy theory that the shooting was a hoax.
Lying is about intention, not about whether sentences parse to true under some particular framing. Making statements with the intention to deceive, which successfully deceives it's target audience is lying, regardless if some sort of semantic dissection of those statements can't find lies in the sub components if they are chopped up into sufficiently small sub statements.
The article bothers me on two levels. The first is this where I have a broader understanding of lying where it is synonymous with intentional deception, including stating technically true things in a way that is intended to mislead an audience.
The second is even on the most narrow definition of lying, intentionally stating false facts, there's a lot of that going around too and picking up examples here and there of other kinds of disingenuous communication isn't going to going to address instances where it is hard to avoid that a straight lie is the most plausible explanation.
And relative to Scott's main point regarding censorship, where does this take you?
I strongly disagree with the argument that because detecting deception requires interpreting context the subjective nature of this endeavor makes it difficult to distinguish deception from non-deception reliably enough to justify censorship.
I however am sympathetic to a related argument that because would-be censors are prone to both errors in judgment and abuses of power, we should generally avoid censorship outside of some relatively limited contexts depending on what powers the censor is using to silence speech and what burdens this places on the people being censored to express their views.
Yes, this narrow definition no longer supports his overall point.
I think his overall point is correct. But it's not correct because there aren't some cases where Infowars says "X said Y" which are clearly asserted to support Y. It's correct because the vast majority of cases that people care about aren't so clear.
I think Scott picked an artificially narrow definition of lying to avoid having to admit that there are some clear cut cases of lying that do happen but that this narrowing actually undermined rather than supported his original case.
> It doesn't matter if the lying is indirect, through misinterpreting statistics, or poorly worded questions on surveys
It very much matters when it comes to remedies, which is Scott's point. If you are trying to divine a person's 'intention' when you are not inside their head, good luck to you. Alex Jones is perhaps an easy edge case. Fox News or the Washington Post, not so easy.
Agree. As I started reading that comment I just kept thinking “this is someone who thinks that they can determine intent with some degree of certainty.”
Fox News is often an easy case. It's interesting how political biases can make people borderline radical skeptics in the ability to discern intent when it comes to deception in a way they'd never apply to their personal lives. Of course, that people who would be censors are susceptible to that very same motivated gullibility is a reason why it is risky to hand off censorship powers to people.
After reading a bunch of comments I am compelled to recommend this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the definition of lying: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lying-definition/
How does this NY Times article rank on the scale of intentional omissions to outright lying?
"Three officers pin Mr. Floyd facedown
(...)
Mr. Floyd began saying repeatedly that he could not breathe. "
https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd.html
Floyd said that he couldn't breathe earlier.
I agree with the basic point that there is no clear cut line between media articles reporting what they perceive to be technically true and intentionally lying. Separating the wheat from the chaff is generally a difficult task (unless your truth is really boring). While I do subscribe to the belief in an objective reality, there is a big difference between capital-T Truth contained in math and nature (which can never be completely known to humans) and any common sense / consensus reality interpretation of neural signals received by some brain.
Suppose that you instead set out to prove that determining the perpetrators of homicides is in fact a hard task, and you start by claiming that people almost never murder other people.
Parts of the readership will probably start naming alleged murderers. Of course, for exactly none of them the claim "X is a murderer/murderess" will be a Truth, because no such claim about reality can ever be recognized as a Truth.
Mens rea (or intend) is impossible to Prove: one can never know precisely what goes on in another persons mind.
The physical act of killing is also impossible to Prove: strictly speaking, there is no pure causal relationship between a bullet leaving a gun barrel and entering a victims brain. After all, the bullet interacts with air molecules on its path in a way not precisely determined by the shooter and there is always some probability that the bullet will tunnel through the skull without interacting with the brain at all.
The unlawfulness of a killing is also impossible to Prove: even if we assume that the law is whatever the courts say it is, they may uphold different opinions at different times and a Truth can hardly be time-dependent.
Anything which was determined in any court proceedings can be quickly dismissed by pointing out that the prosecutor never Proved to your satisfaction that the court proceeding with all its findings and participants was not a figment of imagination of someone.
In the real world where courts determine lowercase-t truth, and claiming that you are innocent of murder because
a) you believed arsenic would not have adverse health effects
b) you did not tell your victim that the tea was fit for human consumption
c) you believed that the victim was immune due to them being a lizardperson
d) you believed you were assisting the victim's suicide
e) you had no reason to believe that an unknown substance in an unlabeled vial might be harmful
will not help very much (unless substantiated by some evidence pointing to another suspect).
Likewise, while nobody can Disprove the claim that Alex Jones is our fellow searcher for the Truth stumbling through the epistemic darkness of human existence, my common sense says that the court which ruled against him with regard to Sandy Hook might have been on the right track.
I'm glad Scott is continuing to beat this drum. This article, along with the previous one, feel like the kind of classic 2014-era Scott articles that ought to be a genuine mindset-shift for a lot of people. The media really doesn't lie, at least when "lie" has the simple and plain definition of "something that isn't true". If you get into the murkier stuff like "lie of omission" or "lie of misrepresentation", then maybe, but those aren't really lies in the traditional sense; they're deceptions aimed at taking advantage of common human logical failures. Using innuendo and "expert opinion" (i.e. outsourcing lies to others) to paint a skewed version of reality is something that's omnipresent in the media. And this isn't even getting into the meta level stuff like abusing the availability heuristic every time the media reports on a mass shooting or a terrorist attack to paint them as far larger issues than they actually are.
While it may be true they don't lie in a certain technical sense this sense no longer supports the original argument.
The original piece was arguing that you can't argue that policies banning misinformation aren't a problem because they'll only exclude clearly false and valueless claims. That is supposed to follow because the media doesn't literally lie so it's hard to decide if a given story is misinformation.
But it's not hard to tell when an article clearly means to quote someone to imply the underlying claim is true. No one doubts that when Infowars is quoting someone saying Sandy Hook was staged they aren't doing so merely because the fact that this random person said that is interesting in itself but to support the claim it was in fact staged.
I ultimately agree with the conclusion that it's hard to draw a bright line between misinformation and valid journalism but the fact that Infowars frames it's claims as "expert X says Y" rather than just Y doesn't really support that conclusion.
The problem comes up when you have unclear degrees of belief, eg, distinguishing between the COVID vaccine should have been tested more and it's more harmful than beneficial. Or when it really is somewhat unclear whether a source is being quoted for the truth of their claim or because it's noteable they said that (eg w/ government sources).
So I agree with the general thrust of the argument and I defended him on the last post. However, I think in an attempt to avoid admitting that the media sometimes does lie in the relevant sense he's defined lie so narrowly as to no longer support his original point.
He should have just admitted that sometimes the media does lie in the relevant sense but that it's not the usual case and that most of instances that concern ppl fall more into a grey area.
I think your articles are doing a good job in documenting how people actually do give a misleading impression using selectively chosen facts. Thanks for this!
As a dedicated conspiracy aficionado, I've written quite a lot about this topic. (Links below)
https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-mandela-effect
https://questioner.substack.com/p/when-conspiracy-theories-are-real
In this case, I think it's most likely caused by confirmation bias. Journalism is not a neutral profession like it used to be: everybody has a partisan bias nowadays. This incentivizes them to view their own sides behavior very charitably while giving the least amount of charity to their opponents actions. So they THINK they're reporting the news in a fair and even-handed way but actually they are projecting their own interpretation and viewpoint onto the events.
Scott, I remember an excellent old post from you on LessWrong where you dug into Cheerios' claim that
eating their cereal would lower cholesterol, and you called it "false and misleading advertising" and summarized the FDA's position as "Don't lie about cholesterol on your cereal box, please." It seems to me that, by the standards of this post, General Mills wasn't lying, they were just reporting what an extremely misleading study said, in a yet more misleading way. Fair?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qJM5kuxN8j3PwNNx6/cheerios-an-untested-new-drug
Thank you for putting so much work into this, Scott
Top post of 2022. Just under the wire too!
I agree. Basically, why lie when you can report a factoid. The problem is not outright fabrication, it's a failure to sanity check and/or contextualise. Readers, especially naïve readers, expect media "authorities" to be taking a neutral POV and to not be running an agenda. This is the system failure.
Sailer has said for a long time that NYT doesn't outright lie, they just amplify the messages they want amplified.
How many true facts happen each day? Journalists decide each day which one to right about. I think a lot of it is decided by what fits the recent narrative.
Black on white murder? Derbyshire talks about it. White on Black? NYT's front page jam. Black on black... not a lot of attention. Too common to even make the news.
I read the New York Times extremely closely and I trust them not to outright lie.
On the other hand, they also mislead frequently and misinform by not informing.
For example, the news section of the NYT will _never_ lie by writing "the homicide rate fell in 2020, the year of the 'George Floyd racial reckoning.'"
The NYT will however mislead by writing: "the homicide rate rose in 2020, the year of the covid pandemic" and exiling any mention of other headline events of 2020 to paragraph 17.
And the NYT will fail to inform. For example, I documented on June 8, 2021 that the black homicide death rate and the black traffic fatality rate have been closely correlated ever since the Black Lives Matter movement became a big deal at Ferguson in August 2014. Both the Ferguson Effect and, especially, the Floyd Effect have driven up both the black homicide rate and black motor vehicle fatal accident rate, likely due to less proactive policing of blacks. But the New York Times has yet to consider that news that's fit to print.
But who can blame the NYT, when Scott himself couldn't mention my finding in "What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?"
"(I’m aware of Steve Sailer’s version, but I’m specifically trying NOT to cite Steve Sailer here)"
https://www.takimag.com/article/surviving-the-happiness-explosion/
I switched careers to punditry in part because I figured I'd contribute to human welfare: that I'd figure out a pattern and then academics and journalists would follow up on my finding. But, to my horror, I've found that I, personally, appear to have dumbed down humanity because nobody wants to risk being canceled by citing what I've discovered.
Please, just plagiarize me. It's for the good of humanity. Too many people die when my findings are ignored.
This must have been a lot of research ... thanks for this interesting take.
I agreed with the thrust of your original piece but I feel this response seriously undercuts it.
You've basically retreated to saying: the media doesn't say false things because they correctly cite other people who do say the false thing.
Ok, that is technically true but it also then kinda misses the whole point. Of COURSE the media doesn't claim (in it's factual reporting rather than editorials) to have first hand knowledge of most claims so they cite someone else.
Even when the first ammendment applies we don't accept that as a valid defense (on its own) to an accusation of defamation. So even in probably the most speech protective legal regime in the world we think it's possible to sufficiently distinguish good faith reporting of the news from negligent or purposeful spreading of false claims.
And that argument proves too much. I mean, it would suggest that merely putting "X says" in front of something makes it impossible to determine whether the author is implicitly endorsing what X says as credible or undermining them and that's clearly false.
--
I still fundamentally agree with the thrust of your original post which I took to be that it's a lot more complicated to distinguish misinformation from valid reporting than one might think. However, I don't think that just because someone doesn't say something in their own voice is a good argument for that claim.
Let me lay out what I took the structure of your initial argument to be and thus why I don't see this as a compelling response.
Claim being argued against: There isn't any problem with social media companies banning misinformation because it's false information with no redeeming value and no useful information/args will be affected.
Scott:
1) The media rarely engages in outright lying.
2) Therefore, any attempt to ban disinformation is going to have trouble banning only the false information.
Now that argument is relatively persuasive if one understand "outright lying" to mean publishing stories which can be clearly and easily seen to support a false claim.
However, you are now interpreting 1 to mean: doesn't make any cfalse claims directly in their own voice and only accurately quotes those who do.
But then 2 no longer follows. Yes, it's true that Infowars might always quote some 'expert' (often someone they have a disturbingly close relationship with) and cite them as the source but no one (not critics or supporters) doubts that they are putting forward that individual as credible.
I ultimately agree that the problem of distinguishing misinformation is real but the problem isn't that once the claim is made in someone else's voice it's impossible to tell whether the author is merely observing that someone said that or quoting it for the truth of what is being said.
The hard part is distinguishing degrees of belief. Ok, maybe I know an article means to question the certainty that COVID vaccines are safe and effective but how do you draw a line that allows claims saying that more rigorous safety testing was appropriate and those who imply that the vaccine is more likely to make you sick than better? Especially given the way partisanship influences how we read things.
Agreed and endorsed.
Beyond the application to fighting misinformation, I think it's actually quite good news to confirm that media wrongdoing is almost always about wrong analysis and context around the raw facts, rather than the raw facts themselves being made up. It means we as readers have a fighting chance, by thinking hard about the raw facts themselves and by seeking more context and more analysis.
If the raw facts themselves really were routinely false, *then* we'd be in much deeper trouble!
Man there's a lot of heat in these comments. Just chiming in to say that I really liked and enjoyed these two essays and they expanded my worldview
On an unrelated note: that Bohemian Grove photo looks uncannily like the settings for Season 2 Episode 1 of *Inside Job*, a humourous animated show with the premise "what if all conspiracy theories were true" by the creator of *Gravity Falls*. Alex Hirsch really knows his conspiracy theories. Great show, highly recommended
Scott, I suspect you would have gotten less pushback if your post was titled
" The Media Frequently Misleads and Deceives, But Very Rarely Lies Outright"
Scott, I've been thinking about this in the context of "what form of censorship could protect the truth, given that most lies are done by boosting true facts". And I had an idea!
Headline censorship. No, wait, hear me out. It's an obvious truth that few people have it in them to read the full article and instead what we have is a bunch of deceptive headlines floating around backed by technically true articles. So focus on the part of the iceberg that's sticking out of the water, because that's the part that hits ships. Put heavy censorship on headlines and article titles and first few sentence quotes. Get very strict with that shit and force them to be ambiguous. No "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" headline, only "Here is information relating to potential weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". Headlines are what are shared on social media, so crack down on those.
This is the censorship regime that will do something useful for the cause of truth. Work to defang headlines and maybe "first few sentence previews" and force people to actually read an article to know the lies it is telling. I really do think that could help.
So... kill interest in the news.
Yes, and this would be an unambiguously good thing.
I believed you the first time around, even without checking your sources.
I propose an alternate hypothesis for why people claimed these news stories contained direct lies: Brains performing involuntary error correction.
When an input approximately matches an expected pattern, human brains "correct" it to exactly match that pattern (as described in e.g. Surfing Uncertainty).
Across many arguments about board game rules, I've encountered a lot of people who seem either unwilling or unable to understand the "rules as written" (RAW). They will continue to insist that their preferred reading of the rules is NOT a guess at the intent, NOT a house rule to improve the game, but literally and precisely what the rules actually say. Even after I've diagrammed a syntax tree for the sentence to show that the grammar is unambiguous and can't be read that way.
I don't think the hypothesis of "they desperately want to believe there's a bright line between the good guys and the dumb/evil guys" really works for explaining the board game arguments. So my hypothesis is that their brain is "helpfully" "correcting" the "erroneous" input before it reaches the level of conscious awareness.
(This could probably be overcome if they actually paid attention to the fricking syntax tree, but many people seem to trust their gut impression over any formal analysis.)
It's kind of mind-blowing that you need to explain this to soi-disant rationalists. Mathew 7:5 comes to mind.
Was already sold on the first post, but I do think that at some point you have to draw a line between "honest misinterpretation" and "deliberately interpreting in the worst possible way".
A lot of the media on both sides frequently do the latter. It may not technically be a lie, but it is extremely dishonest.
It's like saying "My IQ is 140" based on some stupid online test you took, despite having taken actual IQ tests since then and getting a much lower. Or saying "my penis is 11 inches" because you manoeveured the ruler in some insane way to make it look that way.
In both cases you are purposefully misinterpretating or ignoring information to favour your desired narrative. That may not technically be lying, but it should be viewed on the same footing!
>In order to find people who were saying this when it wasn’t true, I restricted my Google search to articles from before June 1 2020.
>These articles were written before COVID had spread very far in the United States, and were right that it had (thus far) killed far fewer people than the flu that year.
This seems like a restriction you created yourself. Why would you cut off July through December, after COVID got rolling and before the vaccines came out?
People saying true facts in out-of-context misleading ways seems like an attempt to deceive.
From Oxford:
de·ceive
/dəˈsēv/
ver
(of a person) cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage.
"I didn't intend to deceive people into thinking it was French champagne"
Similar:
swindle
defraud
cheat
trick
hoodwink
hoax
dupe
take in
mislead
delude
fool
outwit
misguide
lead on
inveigle
seduce
ensnare
entrap
beguile
double-cross
gull
con
bamboozle
do
sting
diddle
rip off
shaft
bilk
rook
pull a fast one on
pull someone's leg
take for a ride
throw dust in someone's eyes
put one over on
take to the cleaners
fiddle
swizzle
sell a pup to
sucker
snooker
stiff
euchre
bunco
hornswoggle
pull a swifty o
be disloyal to
be untrue to
be inconstant to
cheat on
cheat
betray
break one's promise to
play someone false
fail
let down
I didn't see lie.
Regarding what I understand as your main point, the practical aspect of "censorship": you seem to be taking as grunted that only blunt and easily falsifiable factual claims can be used to objectively distinguish "real news" and "fake news", and all other kind of deceiving stand on equal footing in the sense that their identification requires personal judgment calls.
I strongly disagree.
For example, in many cases (probably most), it's not too difficult to objectively decide whether a news-item: (A) promotes a certain claim (either directly or by-proxy, either implicitly or explicitly), (B) omits or strongly downplay some well-known trustworthy facts that change the entire story (either deliberately or by negligence, doesn't matter).
Such a news item can be comfortably labeled as "fake news". Is this a watertight scheme? Of course not, especially not when evaluated per-item. But we don't have to censor individual news-items. Instead, we may identify sources with high-rate of "fake-news" according to criteria of this sort, and silence them. This could be quite robust.
While such a system will still allow deceiving and misleading (obviously), it can be argued (and I think it's true) that it will significantly tone down the amount of harmful and overt bullshit tainting the public discourse.
Anyway, my point is not to suggest some kind of a specific mechanism to fight fake-news, but to point out that you in-fact made no effort to show that such a mechanism is impossible, just straight-out jumped to this conclusion (which I believe to be wrong).
I just want to point out that the nitpicks point you’re making doesn’t actually matter for the argument you’re having with most censors and media critics. I don’t think their definition of a “lie” is the same as yours. So when you point out that they can’t just censor “lies” (as you’ve defined them), they can respond “but that’s not the kind of lie I had in mind - I meant the kind of misinformation that requires only the most obvious, commonsense context sensitivity to label as a falsehood.”
The real argument is over how often there is such a thing as “obvious, commonsense context sensitivity” that we can trust censors to police on our behalf. It’s not easy to decide. You ban trolls here fairly often, even though their infractions are often just using words in ways that seem offputting. But you trust yourself enough to distinguish between subtleties of tone and decide who’s arguing in bad faith.
It’s fine to make the nitpicks point you’ve made, and I agree it’s true. I just think it’s mostly irrelevant to your argument about censorship at best, or a weakman/strawman at worst.
Hi,
I think infowars makes a clearly false claim here " Moreover, the document contains text, numbers, and lines with suspicious white borders indicating these items were pasted from the original scan and dropped over a background image of green paper." If they claimed "The document contains text, numbers, and lines with white borders" then that would be a fact. But the claim is that *these white borders are (a) suspicious and (b) indicate that these items were pasted from the original scan and dropped over a background image of green paper.* This is false. They are not making a claim about a fact, and then saying that they are interpreting it in some way. They are making a claim that their interpretation is correct, and that is also a factual statement. It can be falsified by scanning a document on a similar machine and looking at the results: if they appear even fr a document you know is real then their claim is false.
Int he same way this statement is false "However, when the government released PDF is taken into the image editing program Adobe Illustrator, we discover a number of separate elements that reveal the document is not a single scan on paper, as one might surmise. " The claim is that *a number of separate elements reveal the document is not a single scan on paper*. But the separate elements are a result of, as you say Adobe grouping elements together. So they made Infowars is making a verifiable, factual claim, that is incorrect. I don't see any difference in status between the two claims *we discover a number of separate elements* which you are calling a fact and *this reveals that the document is not a single scan on paper* which you appear to be saying is not a fact. Both are falsifiable claims about the world.
FWIW, I like and agree with both articles. For the simple reason than outright easily checkable lies are less effective at misleading people than shading or misrepresenting (partial) truths.
One thing I would push back on is that the media doesn't know what it is doing. "They're honestly just failing at reasoning". For the most part, I suspect the answer is "not really". Fox knows it's misrepresenting facts and, furthermore, that doing so will generate the lie in its viewers' minds without them having to completely spell it out and actually lie.
I'm still not entirely sure as to why they are doing it. Is Murdoch a true believer? Certainly, he found it profitable to exploit older people's fears and sell ads about gold coins and adult diapers. Certainly, he's a conservatively-minded person. But I kinda be surprised if he really believed the election was stolen, the vaccine was more dangerous than COVID etc etc.
All Things Re-Considered by Peter Boghossian does a lot to refute your premise. I cannot think of any topic more than Climate Change that has been completely lied about more where political science has replaced actual science. As a 30 year Washington Post and NY Times reader, I have a hard time reading these publications now. Granted, what is not reported versus what is reported is large problem but there is an overall loss of trust in the media and claiming the media is not lying is simply BS.
Depressingly, a lot of people seem to interpret articles as one-dimensional expressions of positive or negative valence, rather than reading the claims they're actually making. So they interpreted your article as "Media good!" (even though you made a point of clarifying that wasn't what you meant) and felt obliged to reply "No, media bad!"
(I think the same happened with your "still crying wolf" article about Trump: people misread it as "Trump good!", so every time Trump did anything bad, they contacted you saying "No, see, you're wrong: Trump bad!")
Of course, it's no coincidence that the people who misread your article as saying "Media good!" interpret media articles in a similarly one-dimensional way, so will give them as examples of the media lying even when they're not.
The basic take-away on both your original claim and the pushback you received is, once again, that nobody actually reads the article but only headline or - more likely - headline "vibes".
On Iraq in particular, I recommend Robert Jervis "Why Intelligence Fails" - a summary of the post-mortem he conducted for the CIA after the Iraq debacle. He concludes, quite sensibly, that the intelligence community was actually not wrong to arrive at its conclusions based on the data available (indeed the conclusions were shared by most foreign intelligence agencies) but that it failed to adequately question the likely explanations for its conclusions and then appropriately convey the level of uncertainty (which was high) to policy makers.
Understanding the world is harder than most angry folks on the internet think.
This was a thoughtful and interesting article, full of uncomfortable facts. So of course it's getting ratio'd. For what it's worth, I have done some research like this in the past, and just like you, I kept finding sources and data that seemed incredibly unlikely to be true, but which I could not in good faith absolutely classify as a lie.
But if you had been a reporter and declared that they were lying, then you would not be lying?
In the age of AI generated content, anyone who has access to the resources could produced enough generated information to make a false narrative appear true. Especially, when that content comes from an authority figure, who produces data the average person can't verify themselves. Then you have an army of deceived people doing the rest of the work for the propagandist.
It's is useful to draw attention to the use of factual information to lead people to false conclusions. This is the heart of disinformation, which need not itself be false to spread falsehoods. This is a major limitation of "fact checking".
Nevertheless, I do think that we're playing a bit of a semantic game. The concept of lying absolutely covers lies of omission, where you say something that is entirely true but omits a key fact. That still counts as lying if you do it in order to deceive, which is why in court you swear to tell not just the truth but the WHOLE truth.
The key for perjury, though, is intent, and so when we say "Alex Jones is lying" or "the New York Times is lying", we're making a claim about their INTENTIONS when they omit important information in their strictly factual reporting. Maybe that's unfair but when a particular person or sourc exhibits a pattern of behavior, it's both fairly reasonable and totally inevitable.
This all seems right. It is one of the reasons I've stopped paying attention to the news. As with many things it looks to me like the feedback loop is acting on the wrong variable. News is now about entertainment and getting you to come back for more. We are not consumers of news now, but the thing that is sold to advertisers. Eyeballs and clicks. I think substack may be one way to make this better. We need to pay for our news and then we can ask the news service to do it 'right'. I will observe that Elon opened the twitter files to two people on substack. Maybe that is a better future for the news?
I think judging Infowars by its text articles alone is a misstep. Articles are long, take time to write, and pass through editors, so it's no surprise that they're dutiful in hedging their sentences and bucking responsibility to patsy secondary sources. But catch Alex live on air and within ten minutes you'll hear him say he personally witnessed Joe Biden eating a baby or something.
Yes, exactly. And roughly nobody who's bought into what Infowars is selling got there from reading their text articles, LOL. The couple such people I've met spoke only (and on and on and on) of seeing Jones on TV or hearing him on the radio.
Assessing Infowars by its text articles is like assessing the NYT based on the little "clarifications" that they run at the bottom of an interior page.
Given your top examples of reporting what Rand Paul says and an obviously unreliable poll I think you're setting the bar extremely high for what constitutes lying. Remember the gag in Futurama about technically correct being the best form of correct, well the joke is that it's not best. Selecting what is published and how are as important as simple textual analysis in assessing the media. You are absolutely right that media rarely says things outright false but is that an important thing to be right about?
Has somebody who actually understands this stuff gone on a deep-dive into what we know about Russian missile stocks and usage rates?
I think that if the conclusion (the censorship/misinformation problem) was at the top, and people read the original argument with that framing in mind, then there may not have been so much debate over the definition of “lying” used here.
My favorite example is NPR's rebunking of the Steele Dossier, particualrly the Prague Meeting.
The claim was that Trump Guy met Russian Guy in Prague.
It turned out that:
Trump Guy did NOT meet Russian Guy in Prague.
Trump Guy did NOT meet Russian Guy in any other place at any other time ever.
Trump Guy had never been to Prague.
NPR went on to say the the Prague story was "generally true." You see, other Trump-associated people HAVE met with other Russians, and some of those meetings have taken place in other European cities! So the story is generally true, just in error in some particular details.
One lens is that bias is a spectrum, rather than a binary (lying vs. not lying). All reporters are human, so all reporters have bias. Totally agreed that most of the bias comes from selective coverage (picking what to cover and what to highlight), and this bias is often unintentional. Things are further down on the bias spectrum when someone is setting aside journalistic standards to find facts that support a narrative.
Just seems like repeatedly misleading over and over is lying.
You are correct about this. You were before and you still are now.
I want to add my voice in support of Scott. I didn't answer to the first post, because his conclusion was obvious. At first, I was also confused why Scott would make that technical point. Only at the end of the article I understood that he was talking about censorship. I was almost appalled about how many people did not share or understood Scott's point - again, I believe it's about censorship.
What I would like to add to the mix is Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address to Harvard University "A WORLD SPLIT APART" from 1978: https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
Even back then he argued that the West was devolving into a purely legalistic system, including the media. He argues for moral responsibility and obligations that go beyond rights.
I think it is a very good point and the same as Scott's: The media are not legally lying, but we (should) expect more than that.
But I think "purely legalistic" means the same thing as "taking action only on objective evidence, by following a transparent and public set of rules agreed on before-hand using a uniform method which has legitimacy in the eyes of the public". That would be evolution, not devolution.
First, I would not agree with your equation. Legalistic means "to the letter of the law", which is much more in line with Scott's argument that even Infowars is *technically* not lying.
Secondly, I am not sure that your latter half of the equation is contradiction-free? "taking action only on objective evidence" which is immediately limited "by following a ... set of rules agreed on" and even further pruned by "using a method which has legitimacy in the eyes of the public" - how much truth is there necessarily left after "the eyes of the public" have agreed upon rules? Something Something Nazi Progroms.
Thirdly, would you describe the current media landscape that, in my opinion, lacks almost any sense for a more responsible, more nuanced approach to reporting as evolution?
I guess there is an argument to be made towards the rise of the likes of Substack as a response. But I am not entirely convinced yet.
The legalistic argument can not only be made about news media, it seems to affect scientific papers as well (though it might be intrinsically more robust and self-correcting?).
It is even applied more broadly in the sentiment, that "everyone"/"young people" are just claiming their rights these days, and not taking on enough responsibility. "Ask not what your country can do for you..." You know the drill.
Science is legalistic. In many disciplines, there is a codified standard of "proof" which spells out what methodology you should use, what preconditions your experiment and data must satisfy, how to perform what kind of statistical test, and what numerical result you require, to be published. If we didn't have that legalistic approach, you'd have something like literary criticism, where anybody can say anything.
The fact that the Nazis made terrible laws doesn't mean laws are bad. Legitimacy itself is no guarantee of goodness. But legitimacy is by definition meeting the cultural standards for having authority. The alternative to legitimacy is authority without legitimacy, which is (also by definition) tyranny.
"Science is legalistic. In many disciplines, there is a codified standard of "proof" which spells out what methodology you should use, what preconditions your experiment and data must satisfy, how to perform what kind of statistical test, and what numerical result you require, to be published."
Da, Comrade Lysenko. Your agricultural processes have been verified by all the finest certified experts of science! We will have a bountiful harvest this year!
Sarcasm is not an argument, and you should refrain from commenting on things you know nothing about. The statements you attempted to ridicule are not controversial. Google "95% confidence interval" for an introduction.
You continue to pretend that "arbitrary" is the same thing as "objective" and "transparent," when in fact they are nothing of the sort.
And frankly, you are the one who is showing signs of profound ignorance here. There are MANY "objective" "scientific" standards/criteria/thresholds that are completely disconnected from physical reality. Two of the best known (among my personal circle of AOAC/industrial types) are the EPA's MDL calculation which was known bogus for literally decades and Sematech's YE roadmap.
If you're going to pretend to know what you're talking about, don't toss "confidence interval," at least throw out Hubaux-Vos of something vaguely relevant.
"Purely legalistic" is exactly the opposite of "taking action only on objective evidence."
It means following the process, even (or especially) if doing so deviates from the purported purpose of the process.
A legal code is an objective specification of the evidence you require to take specific actions. You therefore require a legal code in order to take action on, and only on, objective evidence.
When you are not acting legalistically, you must use unwritten, non-public, non-transparent guidelines, phrased in ambiguous language, like traditional moral codes, which bottom out in "I know it when I see it!" or "Everyone knows!" claims.
There is nothing objective about a code or specification. Arbitrary, yes but that's completely different.
The exclusionary rule is part of the US legal code that is there because it was (arbitrarily) decided that some outcomes are better than others and that rule is explicitly about excluding objective evidence.
A bureaucracy is legalistic. There's nothing objective or reality-based about it.
Why should people’s evaluation of the legitimacy of Scott’s argument change because of the conclusion he came to? I can make all sorts of specious arguments for why censorship is bad; the fact that IMO it IS bad should not retroactively legitimize any argument to that effect (“raccoons are a type of fish that live in desert huts, therefore censorship is bad” should hopefully not change your opinions about raccoons).
I don't think I understand your argument. In my mind I reconstructed Scott's motivation to write the article as follows: Some people would like to censor misinformation. What is misinformation? Untrue statements are definitely misinformation. But there is also a lot of ways to only use true statements, but by leaving out context, etc still effectively misinform readers. Unfortunately, it is a matter of degree and of intent whether it is an honest mistake or a devious lie; continous degree makes it difficult to draw a line in the sand, intent is impossible to prove.
Thereby we can only safely remove misinformation when it consists of untrue statements. Everything else gets treated like anyone *accused* of criminal behavior: In dubio pro reo.
People who seem to disagree with Scott's statement seem to make a judgement call about truth without realizing it. Even further, noone is exempt from that, its a fact of life. This is why we don't want censorship, right?
I really like your much clearer and more direct reformulation of Scott’s arguments; you’ve avoided hit-button claims like “there are essentially no lies in the media”, not by a legalistic definition of “lie” but by the much less emotionally freighted “untrue”.
The one nit I’d pick with your elucidation of the argument is the implicit assumption that any attempt to control misinformation is necessarily a punishment that must take intent into account. I’m generally sympathetic to that view, but I don’t think it’s so indisputable that it should go unexamined.
I think the reason there is controversy here is that some people think you are trying to tell people how to decide whether to believe the message of an article, when you are really trying to tell people how to design a censoring procedure.
You have defined lying as “making false statements”, which is reasonable, but others have defined lying as “making statements with intent to deceive”, which is also reasonable. The distinction is not really relevant if you are reading an article and trying to decide whether or not to believe it’s message, but it’s very important if you are trying to design a censoring procedure. By your definition, you can’t censor anything because the articles don’t meet the definition of lying, and by the other definition, you can’t censor anything because the procedure for determining if it’s lies is too onerous, since you can’t determine is solely from the text of the article, nor even from omniscient knowledge about everything outside of the author’s mind.
You checked on Republican misinformation. You should also check Democrat misinformation. See if you can find a media outlet claiming that the Earth is doomed if we do nothing about climate change before 2100, or that sea level rise could flood our coastal cities by 2100, or that American police officers are more likely to shoot a black suspect than a white suspect, or that Republicans are more racist than Democrats, or that--wait, here's one: "Trump said Mexicans are rapists".
The "Trump said Mexicans are rapists" lie is, I think, a clear case where reporting can be both literally true and a lie. Trump said, of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border, "They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He literally said "They're rapists", but it's obvious that his intent was to say that /some/ illegal immigrants are rapists.
If you quoted Trump directly: 'Trump said, of illegal immigrants from Mexico, "They're rapists" ', you could at least claim to be technically telling the truth. But if you write "Trump said Mexicans are rapists", that is a lie, because by writing a summary rather than a quote, you're claiming that Trump said something equivalent to what /you/ would mean by the statement "Mexicans are rapists," rather than equivalent to what someone would mean who, like Trump, can only hold so many words in his head before he must blurt them out, relying on his listeners to supply the necessary contextual details.
A more-marginal case was in the recent Johnny Depp trial, which Depp won largely on the basis of audio recordings he'd made of his fights with Amber Heard. One exchange went something like this:
Heard: "So you say that you, a man, were abused by me, a woman?"
Depp: "Yes."
Heard: "Who do you think's going to believe you?"
Conservative media reported the entire exchange. Radical media outlets omitted the last line, changing the story from "Heard tells Depp nobody will believe his claims because he's male" to "This stupid privileged male Depp claims he was abused by a woman."
This is technically a case of "not lying, but omitting"; but it's like quoting someone who said "I am not a Marxist" as having said "I am... a Marxist". It's like quoting a comedian's joke but leaving out the punchline to make him look like an idiot. It's an omission which deliberately changes the meaning of the entire content. This isn't misleading by omission, which I think characterizes Scott's examples in the post; but deception by omission. There's no sharp boundary between the two, but there's rarely a sharp boundary between any two similar categories. I think we must still attempt to make the distinction, for as long as we're limited to unquantified human language.
TL;DR: Whether or not a statement is a lie depends not only on the syntax and semantics of a statement, but also on its pragmatics. Pragmatics IS PART OF LANGUAGE. It's lying to make a claim whose literal semantic interpretation is correct, but whose culture-specific pragmatic interpretation is false.
I’m not sure you you could evaluate whether a statement about what will happen post-2100 if hypotheticals between now and then are not done could be evaluated as a “lie” or not. Lies generally mean going against objective facts, and last I checked climate is incredibly complicated and the facts from 80 years in the future are not available yet. Wouldn’t this be like accusing someone for lying for picking the wrong Super Bowl winner today?
If you say, "I think sea level may rise 4 feet by 2100", that's not a lie; it's your own private guess. If you say, "Sea levels may rise 4 feet by 2100" or "Rising sea levels will threaten our coastal cities by 2100" in an article without citing a source, that's a lie, because you're implying there's some authoritative source which claims sea levels may rise enough by 2100 to pose an existential threat to many coastal cities.
The IPCC says sea level may rise about 1 foot by 2100. They have multiple scenarios, but no plausible scenario puts the rise much above 1 foot last I checked.
The most-common media lies in climate-change reporting are (A) to report the IPCC's worst-case scenario as its median or most-likely scenario, and (B) to call the IPCC's worst-case scenario the "business as usual" scenario, when in fact it assumes that we start dumping much more CO2 into the atmosphere today. (I think it also assumes that the atmosphere has more CO2 today than it does, but am not sure. It's a legacy scenario, included only for comparison with earlier reports in which it was still possible.)
It does seem to be a lie by the IPCC to include that scenario in the report at all, though, as it's presented as a prediction, yet it isn't plausible--but you can't tell that it isn't plausible just by reading the entire report; IIRC you have to check a cited source on the meaning of the scenarios. This is especially deceptive since the IPCC refuses to attach probabilities to scenarios. At the very least, their excuse for not doing so--"we are not trying to predict the future" IIRC (not an exact quote)--is a lie. Their only reason for being is to predict the future.
Also, please note I said nothing about what will happen post-2100.
Sure, agreed on all counts. But someone who disagrees with estimates of the future is not “lying”. Nobody is picking the Detroit Lions to win the Super Bowl, but since they have not technically been eliminated someone who did so would not be “lying” about this future event, just very likely to be wrong.
A journalist who reports their own opinion, or the opinion of their circle of friends, in a way that implies it came from an authoritative source, is lying.
Another example is how the media successfully brainwashed their audience is the ‘grab them by the pussy’ line.
Wait, where’s the brainwashing?
When someone says "because of the white lines around the print, this birth certificate is fake" they aren't only making a claim about the lines being there, but also about this fact affecting the probability of the birth certificate being fake. They are making a claim about P(A|B) being high(er), with A = "birth certificate is fake" and B = "white lines on a scan of the birth certificate".
By the subtitle of your blog, they claim that [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B) is high. If we slightly change it to P(A) * [P(B|A/P(B)], we have two parts: the prior P(A) and the evidence P(B|A)/P(B). If your P(A) is already very high, you can have A and B to be completely uncorrelated (i.e. evidence close to 1) and your original claim is true. However, this would be the classical Motte and Bailey: the implication is clearly that the evidence makes the term true, not the prior belief, otherwise why bring up the evidence at all?
So the claim has to be that P(B|A)/P(B) is high. This is an empirical claim, though obviously not as easily testable as a simple "true/false". Still, "most fake birth certificate have white lines around print" is an empty claim, not supported by anything in the article, neither is it clear how common are the white lines in general. You might not define it as a lie, but it isn't truth either.
This all is the basic Bayesian approach which you wield very effectively in so many other articles. I'm not sure why you fail to do that here.
I worked as a print journalist for 10 years, at the Boston Globe and Seattle Times. My late wife also was a print journalist, and worked for the NY Times for a few years. Mainstream orgs like the Times and Globe work very hard to expose the truth, that is their stock in trade, and without that they are nothing. Journalists as group are extremely focused on telling truth to power, and exposing corruption and systems in our culture that are broken.
In my experience, the phrase "truth to power" usually has little to do with anything that would normally be recognized as "truth".
Very rivetting and thought-provoking piece, well done! I'm sure it will cause quite the debate..
The evidence of the media of the mainstream, in any form, being a place of real journalism, is very misleading....VERY....The amount of BS and hype over the vax and PLAN-Demic alone when compared to the MASSIVE numbers of dead and injured from the SAFE inoculations (that destroy people's immune system) is DEAD CLEAR evidence that the mainstream media outlets are nothing but mouth pieces for the global elite that own them....The amount of good science now available, not to mention expert testimonials of scores of the best doctors and scientists in the world that goes completely counter-current to what the media has been blabbing all along is MASSIVE.
To believe that mainstream media in any form is authentic journalism suggests the Per Aeternus archetype strongly at play in my opinion.... For those not familiar with the Per Aeternus archetype, it is probably a very good time to watch this video while thinking about what is going on in the world right now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A7GTGSfrIU
Much chi,
Paul Chek
Please get help. The evidence you cite in all caps does not exist. You’ve fallen prey to paranoid thinking. Again: please get help.
The problem with labeling half-truths as "conspiracy theories" is that often the purveyors are trying to present the information legacy media has been left out of a story because it doesn't match the reporter's (or their editor's) politics. I used to be a reporter at the local level. Loved the job, didn't make a lot of money. I quit when we got a new editor who heavily edited several of my articles because I included the opinions (possibly facts) of local residents who challenged the official account of some news items. He said they were wrong and I should stop reporting in a balanced fashion (not his words, but the intent of his words was clear). Being a small town, there was no competition and being pre-internet, I had no way of setting up an alternate source, so I found another job, not in the media field. We still get unbalanced news, but at least I'm not a part of it.
So, you're right. Media doesn't outright lie, but they leave out or emphasize only the parts they agree with, which amounts to their consumers being ignorant of the full facts, which is more or less the state we find ourselves in after we've been lied to.
I generally agree with your thesis here. I did want to present a possible counterexample that came to mind for me when reflecting on the ACX survey, though.
The way I remember it, sometime back in the before-times, then-President Trump made some statement about how NASA moon missions were only a part of a broader strategy to get to Mars. The entire media went nuts with excitement, seemingly certain that Trump had actually made the ridiculous claim that the Moon and Mars were physically connected or something, and went to great lengths to "debunk" that claim.
First relevant example from Google: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/07/trump-moon-is-part-of-mars-tweet-nasa
In that particular example, the author is indeed mostly reporting from a real Tweet that the real @realDonaldTrump really made in reality. But their lede doesn't quote it accurately, incorrectly summarizing it as "Trump announced that the moon is a part of Mars" without much context or summarization, but you could charitably call that a misunderstanding on the part of the author. Similarly, the headline ("...claims the moon is 'a part' of Mars") is awfully inaccurate, but maaaaybe a legitimate misunderstanding in the author's mind?
But the fact that the subheadline (correctly) explains that Trump said NASA should focus on the Moon as opposed to Mars, and a later paragraph near the end of the article does eventually speculate that "[t]there is a possibility Trump’s tweet was a comment on Nasa’s [sic] broader plan to eventually travel to Mars from the moon," which sure suggests to me that the author understood perfectly well what Trump was actually saying, and deliberately chose to misrepresent it in order to make Trump look extra dumb. (And what's the point of that, really? Does Donald Trump really need any help in looking dumb??)
I suppose you could defend it as being an obvious joke directed at readers who also understand perfectly well what Trump was actually saying instead of literal reporting, but I don't now. It sure looks like awfully un-truthy reporting to me, and in a way that goes a bit beyond selectively reporting true facts.
I notice you have cherry-picked examples to support a one-sided argument; I no longer have any faith in you to be fair and non-partisan. I mean never mind about claims about the 2020 U.S. presidential election being stolen, what about claims that the 2016 U.S. presidential election being stolen? Shouldn't you discuss both claims equally?
Additionally; I myself have been, over the past few decades in my own country, been present at political speeches and rallies in my own country and observed most of the news media provide nothing but lies instead any actual news reporting. That's why when a conservative politician, or any off-narrative politician, makes a speech in recent years; there usually no transcript provided in newspapers and the broadcast media will usually show 15 seconds of the speech and 15 minutes of analysis by "experts". That's assuming that such a speech is mentioned at all!
This is a lovely realtime example of misinformation contagion in journalism, which may itself contain misinfo since I haven't verified it: https://www.calmdownben.com/p/romanian-cops-did-not-find-andrew
One of the best aspects of this blog is that it almost always manages to be specific and precise without being pedantic, but unfortunately this line of reasoning is incredibly pedantic. And I'm confused why you're expending so much effort dying on this silly hill?
Yes, we get that it's technically not a "lie" if an article correctly reports that someone else has said some obviously wrong thing. But that's like saying that Madoff is technically not a thief because ponzis are schemes/frauds which is different than outright thievery. This narrows the definition of "lying" to such specific criteria that almost any entity could get away with "not lying" if they were just careful enough to attribute the assertions to someone else.
If Trump repeating "some people are saying [thing he obviously totally made up, but someone in the world has probably said at some point]" unequivocally fails your test for lying, then your criteria for lying kind of blows.
Lovingly....
This, well-said.
So well put
Scott's standard of "lie" here appears to mean "a person such as Scott can quickly figure out *that anyone else can figure out* the report was made up out of thin air".
I think two understated sources of controversy are:
-The standard meaning of "lie" does not require easy falsifiability.
-If content is falsifiable via the common sense of someone that's 98th percentile in gullibility and political bias, that content is unlikely to spread in the first place. Content moderation debates generally refer to content that gets engagement, requiring that at least some of the population is unable or unwilling to notice errors.
If the assertion is that no media org- even InfoWars- frequently makes lies that require digging or mind-reading to disprove, I think Scott has failed to prove this.
If the assertion is that no media org- even InfoWars- frequently makes lies that nobody could believe, then this is a much narrower claim and the title of the essays are misleading.
Perhaps it comes down to a difference in what you view as "lying." For me, reporting facts and editorializing on them in a way that *you know to be false* is lying. I don't care that the facts being used are true, I just care that the writer *knows* they aren't being honest because they have an agenda to accomplish.
Don't get me wrong; I still don't want anyone censoring "misinformation." Because, at the end of the day, how do you judge a journalist's motivation or beliefs?
But I'm very contemptuous of the media because they're wrong forever-always on the things I possess expertise on, and I can tell a sizeable proportion of that wrong-ness is a genuine, on-purpose effort to mislead (maybe for seemingly benign or benevolent reasons, but misleading all the same).
Someone brought up a fast food analogy that I like. Consider the question: "Has a person eating a cheeseburger made a knowing and intentional choice to eat unhealthily?". Yes? Obviously?
Not at all. If you go up to a person eating a cheeseburger and ask them if they are eating something unhealthy they will successfully inform you that this is true. But how many people in deciding to eat a cheeseburger are operating on the thought process: "I wish to eat something unhealthy which is why I will now eat a cheeseburger." Nobody's doing that. They aren't thinking about whether it's healthy. You can't go up to them and press the "Eat Healthy Things" button and have them stop eating cheeseburgers because they have disconnected the circuitry that involves health in their eating choices
So ask yourself: "Is there something akin to eating a cheeseburger that the media can engage in which involves them not primarily reporting things that are accurate and with proper context?" Yes. Obviously. Read Julia Galef's book "The Scout Mindset". This is a book dedicated to encouraging the rare ability to flexibly suspend your preferred beliefs in the pursuit of accuracy. She makes a particularly big deal about the one single global warming skeptic who has publicly changed his mind. Do you believe 99.99% of climate skeptics are intentionally lying and one guy decided to tell the truth?
This is a really important point. If you think the problem with media is people knowingly telling lies and it isn't what's actually happening you will fail to fix the real problem and quite possibly make it worse by creating coercive channels for people to advance their preferred beliefs in good conscience that what they are actually doing is banning misinformation. That button called "Prevent People From Telling Lies" could be taped over the accurate label underneath "Prevent People From Saying Things My Priors Have Determined To Be Categorically Untrue". Who will be more motivated to enact censorship than those who have a motivated and inflexible model telling them that there is an easily determinable set of things which are true?
“fabrications” “caught” “forced” “admission”
Yeah clearly not trying to characterise, or favour a particular interpretation.
For those in the "the given examples of not lying are clearly lies given context or a slightly broader definition" camp I would like some opinions on the following information and an answer as to whether knowing this leads you to believe the media are lying about the subject
In this explainer on the social cost of carbon on Carbon Brief - https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-social-cost-carbon/ - there is a section on the long considered state of the art Integrated Assessment Models (What are PAGE, DICE, FUND, and how do they differ?). The estimated cost to world GDP of warming in 2100 ranges from 4% at high temperatures to as low as a (disputed) small net benefit at a low temperature rise. This low single digit projection can be further contextualized by the median projection of overall GDP growth by 2100 of about 300%. There is no scenario in the IPCC in which welfare in 2100 is less than today. There are also few instances of weather disasters that the IPCC identifies as having a clearly statistically detectable global warming effect. For example hurricanes and typhoons are projected by some to become fewer in number (higher warming in the Arctic reduces the temperature differential that spawns hurricanes) while the number of Category 4 and 5 may stay the same or slightly increase as higher temperatures give them more energy. The bottom line is that there is very much no broad scientific evidence* of anything that would accurately be called catastrophic in the effect of warming in 2100 much less today
Ok. So what do the media headlines say? They say unquestionable evidence of more severe weather caused by warming is happening all around us now that obviously proves that things will be catastrophic in 2100. Are these knowing lies? If the media should know good and well exactly when they are lying would they be doing so in virtually global unison on the biggest story of the century?
*Key phrase of broad scientific evidence. While I am interested in claims that there is scientific evidence of current or future large net costs of warming on the side I do think it is nearly certain that the general evidence that should be accessible to someone who carefully and skillfully intends to tell the truth would not enable them to say that we are currently experiencing or likely to experience in the future a general climate disaster
It feels like most of your responses are of the form, "you said this article says 'X', but actually it says some person said 'X' and then doesn't question that person"
Except I'm pretty sure all news articles consist mostly of reporting peoples' claims so can we say that it still counts as lying if an article quotes someone being wrong and doesn't evaluate the truthfulness of that person's statement? That seems like a bright line category about as easy to identify as making a direct false statement. Yes, there are still other gray areas, but this seems to cover about 80% of them.
I refer you to the IPCC web site which provides the material you want in enormous detail. Of course you could use the last couple of years news to arrive at the same conclusion.
To add to your point about censorship, it's worth noting that there actually is a genre of media where lying is illegal: advertising. The laws against false advertising do help eliminate the egregious snake-oil cons, but they don't change advertising's basic personality, which shows you just how much tone, framing, etc. go into persuasion rather than falsifiable facts per se. Statements like "this shampoo will make your hair look great" aren't falsifiable because what looks great is a subjective matter, even if there's a broad social consensus about what good hair looks like, so there's no real way to police such statements.
Journalism is different from advertising of course, but the problem it's always dealing with is that it has basically the same financial incentives as advertising, unless it's a non-profit outfit. As a former journalist, I agree with much of what you say about how these things can happen, but I do feel that the general discussion here is overestimating the role of ideology and underestimating the role of business interests. A lot of readers' view of the way it works seems to be "the media in their imperial tower decide what we should hear," but a lot of media people experience it as "the readers are telling us what they want to hear with their clicks, and we'd better give it to them or we'll be out of business." Which doesn't lead to deception per se, but it can distort news judgment, which as you accurately say is a big factor in how true facts can turn into the wrong sort of stories.
Hmm....I get the theory here, but: if that was a big factor then wouldn't we expect nonprofit news orgs to be better, along the dimensions being discussed, than are for-profit ones?
That is very much not my observation or experience. [Which is not at all based on any prejudice against professionalized nonprofits -- I am actually a career manager of such and gladly so.]
E.g. I banned NPR (nonprofit) from my daily life around the same time as I did the NYT and WSJ (forprofit); they'd all become just too disappointing in the same manner. ProPublica (nonprofit) is indistinguishable, both for good and for ill, from the large established (forprofit) entities that it was founded as an alternative to. For my money the best mainstream English-language news source nowadays is the Economist which is for-profit; the Guardian meanwhile which is effectively a nonprofit has at best the rigor of today's NYT. Etc.
Granted that the bottom end of modern news media (InfoWars and etc) is a cynical cesspool made up entirely of for-profits. But outside of the gutter, it does not appear that the legal/financial basis of organization is a fundamental distinguishing factor in the caliber of the output.
Non-profit news organizations are free from the incentives that motivate for-profit news, but they have incentives of their own. Or, to be more precise, the people who exercise editorial control over non-profit news orgs are the people who have some interest or motivation in doing so.
Most (by word count) of the ‘news’ these days is actually opinion or what used to be called ‘news analysis.’ Misrepresentation of facts in an opinion piece isn’t usually considered lying. It does erode confidence in the credibility of the news media.
Your thesis about media seems correct to me and lines up with my experience in talking with people.
Late to the party, but I'd argue that there are regular pairings of anecdote with statistic that involve blatant enough equivocation on a term so as to count as "lies".
One common example is a story about the accidental death of a small child playing with a handgun (or a sibling doing so), paired with a statistic on "children killed by firearms annually", where that statistic goes up to age 18 or 19 and overwhelmingly represents teenagers committing suicide and teenaged gang members murdering each other.
To me, that's about as close to the concept of "lie" as if a story on some people dying from E. coli-tainted meat was paired with a statistic on "deaths from meat" that included the estimated increase in heart disease and cancer deaths among meat eaters versus vegans.
The latter example seems absurd -- and would probably be called a lie -- only because it's basically never done, whereas the former is the norm.
I think the main argument that "journalists lie" is more something like:
>But if wrong people (even the most wrong people) are just trying to reason under uncertainty and evaluate the relative strength of different sources of evidence - well, that’s the same thing we’re doing!
is a nice thought. It is something understandable if you just view journalists as barely better than PR flacks or random office workers of many stripes.
But the "news" generally, and prestige news in particular, and many of the people practicing it really adopt and relish the regalia and imprimatur of being a special priestly caste who is predominantly focused on the truth and skepticism and getting to the facts.
When you figure out that half of them are not even doing a piss poor job of this, it makes the half-truths and misleading statements and omitted context, basically tantamount to a lie.
If I sell myself as a climate scientists, and make sure to always speak in December in the northern hemisphere and always comment that the "Well actually the weather is cooling based on the best data", I am definitely "lying" by any reasonable understanding of the term, even if strictly speaking what I said was true.
Hey this is my first time I have read you and thank you.
That's the version I read. So long ago. I had very little of the Polish meme in mind when I read it, believing that the setting was simply a detail. No sense of having to fight off something pejorative in the story. That they misinterpreted what decapitated meant or it was simple clerical error. When it's only 4% that hardly seems like a "here's what these people are like" racist thing. But perhaps that version was motivated by the history of "Polish jokes". Hadn't occurred to me at the time though.
That survey being in Polish might actually explain it a bit, because the obvious way to say decapitated ("ścięty") is sometimes (maybe only in some regions?) used in everyday speech to mean "had their hair cut".
Sure. I considered that 4% of the people didn't know what the word meant as much a possibility as just marking the wrong box. Now if the response could be broken out by region we might have a clue. Also keep taking polls until one is weird and that makes it worth reporting. Of the poll were one of those that had to be answered for access to something then I personally would be inclined to answer yes. I might anyway.
UK media routinely makes stuff up. Cummings believes so and has given many examples
I think Scott's right on his narrow technical point, but I still think there is an effective distinction to be drawn between the broader sense of "lies" and real news. That is: in the production of bad news (infowars style, or fox news style), there is in fact someone in the chain of news production who acts with the intention of deceiving or misleading. I think that person is often very well hidden, as in the Infowars/Sandy Hook case, but they do in fact exist.
I think this because there aren't that many useful idiots in the world. There are plenty of idiots, but because they're idiots, they're not very useful. It is, I suggest, impossible to create a functioning news organisation entirely out of people dumb enough to truly believe that vaccines cause autism/covid vaccines kill/Hunter Biden is a major scandal/whatever. They can't keep the computers and the finances working.
In fact, as the Sandy Hook and Iraq WMD stories show, when a false story is massively propagated, there is a genuine bad actor in there, lying for their own twisted purposes. Among these liars, I would not include the NYT editorial stance on tech, because it was a stance, not a commitment to a factual falsehood.
Now, these bad actors are often very difficult to find, and so the fact that they exist may not help us very much in trying to determine what is and is not fake news. But my base assumption is that the bad actors are much more common than Scott seems to be assuming. That is, e.g. when a news organisation decides "the hill they wanted to die on is "lockdowns are evil and COVID doesn't matter"," they either do so in the explicit knowledge that they are wrong; or if the editors/decision-makers do in fact passionately believe such a thing, they subsequently force their paid journalists to create stories that they (the journalists) know are misleading. Somewhere in the chain of news production, there is deliberate misleading.
There is little practical difference between saying "2+2=5" and saying "some guy online said 2+2=5, is it true? We report you decide."
It is on this distinction that Scott bases his argument, and he ends up being technically true, but not in an obviously valuable way.
In terms of limitations on free speech, what is the difference between shouting "fire" and shouting "some guy online said there was fire!" If both have the same effect of initiating a stampede, and both are prosecuted accordingly, does the second style of statement categorically differ from a lie all that much?
If you keep using a source that has been shown to fabricate things constantly, would that not be intentional deceit? At *some* point the journalist must be considered complicit in the lie
https://mobile.twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1609271590751014915
The primary impact for me however wasn't about the people surveyed but how spectacular the contradiction is.
I think the question of intent is interesting. Does the media present out of context etc. knowingly, to convince the readers of something they know is false, or are they making an honest (maybe motivated reasoning) mistake?
Absolutely the former, absolutely, no question. 100%. Not all the time, but for anything with any real political consequences, 99/100 times its the former.
'A Rape on Campus' by The Rolling Stone is trivially a case of media lies.
It's a while ago and I don't remember the details, but wasn't there an actually existing person who claimed to be the victim of the events described?
So that would actually be another example of Scott's thesis: the "journalist" who wrote the story, did not just make up the whole thing from whole cloth. Rather, they sought and found a mentally disturbed person who could be coaxed into telling them the story they wanted to hear, and then they reported that story while very carefully and deliberately not asking any critical questions which would have caused it to fall apart before publication.
Undoubtedly, if that same journalist had been told a story which they *did not* want to hear (for example, with a white guy from a wealthy family as the victim and a bunch of lower-class minorities as the perpetrators) they would suddenly have turned into Sherlock Holmes, able to pick out the smallest discrepancies in the accuser's story. Or they would have simply ignored it. But still, for the story that actually did get printed, they cared enough about plausible deniability to make sure that there was an actual source they could point at.
I worry that in at least some of these cases you may be using a formalistic (and perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of "lying" that renders it nearly useless (and, as shown by the defamation verdicts in the Alex Jones case, is not how the law works--given that truth is an absolute defense to defamation).
It seems that under your definition, if a media source quotes person X as saying completely false thing Y, and person X in fact did say Y, then that is not "lying." But take this to its conclusion. Suppose Alex Jones wants to say completely false thing Y, without violating your definition of lying. All he has to do is find one (1) person unethical/misinformed/deranged person X, somewhere on the planet, who is willing to say Y, and then he can just say "According to X, Y" and Alex Jones is not "lying." In fact, Alex Jones could *recruit* person X, and instruct him, "Please make a statement where you say Y, which you and I both know is completely false" and then X says Y and now Alex Jones can say "X said Y" and Alex Jones is not "lying."
To me that suggests that this definition of "lying" is so denuded of its ordinary meaning as to depart substantially from English usage. Fortunately, the jury instructions were broader.
>>In any case, it definitely doesn’t look like anyone is making anything up or outright lying. Fox is honestly reporting what Rand Paul said. Rand Paul is honestly reporting what the Vote Pattern Analysis blog said. Vote Pattern Analysis discovered a suspicious-looking true fact, and leapt from there to “fraud!” without considering innocent explanations. <<
You are right on the money.
Scott,
Great analysis as always. For many years I always thought that the difference between conservative media (say, Wall Street Journal) and liberal media (New York Times) is the choice the editors make in what stories to cover, where to place them etc -- with the unavoidable misleading conclusions they lead readers to. That "misleading" I do think is on purpose though -- the media knows their audience and deliberately picks the facts they use so that their readers reach strong opinions, share the articles on Social Media etc. It is not like the Washington Post is hurrying to publish stories about Hunter's laptop in the front page, or Infowars (IMO, a garbage outlet I don't touch) rushes to publish negative stories about Trump.
Here is is somewhat tangential and relatively irrelevant question, but why weren't you able to fully read the bloomberg article? I don't have a bloomberg news subscription and could read the whole thing. Let me guess: bloomberg has one of those "10 free articles a month"-like thingies and you had exhausted your quota by the time you tried to accessed the article?
I still think this is a stretch, because literally anyone who tells a lie, no matter how blatant, will come up with a justification for it after the fact. Like, that's just how arguments work - you make a claim and you support it with other claims. Any liar who says more than one sentence is going to end up mentioning a factual statement *somewhere.*
Like, suppose I say "The moon is made of cheese. Look at the moon - don't those pockmarks in its surface look like the holes in Swiss cheese?" By your standards, I am not lying - I've presented a true statement about what the craters on the moon look like, and encouraged people to interpret that fact towards a false conclusion.
But any definition of "lie" that doesn't even cover "a person says that the moon is made of cheese" is a pretty useless definition of lie. Like, congratulations, you've discovered radical skepticism. Now can we move on to something useful?
> But any definition of "lie" that doesn't even cover "a person says that the moon is made of cheese" is a pretty useless definition of lie.
Any definition of "lie" which *does* cover that case, *assuming that the person actually believes their own claim* and is truthfully reporting their reason for believing it, does not match how people normally use the word. In normal usage, a lie is an intentional attempt to convince somebody else of something which you yourself know to be false.
Except that it's impossible to know whether a person believes their own claim or not, unless they outright say "I was lying when I said the moon is made of green cheese." (And even then, they might be lying about that). Normal people are willing to call other people liars even though they don't the ability to read their mind and know whether they truly believe the lie or not.
There's no way to externally distinguish "this person is ignoring contrary evidence because they're trying to support a conclusion they know is false" and "this person is ignoring contrary evidence because they believe it's the product of an evil conspiracy." This is why the standard for, say, libel, is "they made their statement with reckless disregard for the truth" and not "they knew, deep down, that what they were saying was false."
A judge cannot read Alex Jones's mind to know how much of his Sandy Hook story he truly believes and how much he made up to sell supplements to gullible people, but they can look at the information that Jones had available and conclude that a normal person in his shoes would have known that his claims were very likely to be wrong.
On one hand, I think that you're absolutely correct. On the other, I find it very frustrating that they're using the cheap tactit of "this isn't me that said that, I'm just quoting someone". I know those are unrelated issues, but it feels just so cheap, even more so coming from the media that then tells things like "democracy dies in darkness" and have a very high opinion of themselves and their job.
Thanks a lot for keeping a cool head through this, going down to their level isn't going to solve anything I feel.
It's true that media sources very rarely lie sensu stricto, fabricating events out of whole cloth, but I think you're too generous in attributing good faith to everyone involved.
Sean Hannity says one thing on his show and a very very different thing in private text messages: https://www.businessinsider.com/timeline-sean-hannity-panicked-texts-trump-inner-circle-capitol-riot-2022-1
>They say the shooting was investigated by Connecticut state police instead of Sandy Hook local police, and since the FBI crime statistics are based on local police reports, it didn’t include the shooting.
If that is true, then it means that FBI crime statistics don't account for crime investigated by state police. Which begs the question: who is compiling extensive statistics of crime in the US?
While I can appreciate the time you put into this, you are "misleading" with your evaluation. Main media is simply that. An entertainment and indoctrination medium. The only real news can't be had from a corporate entity.
Reporting and journalism is just the opposite. Our only prayer of actually hearing some truth is through citizen journalism.
Sorry I completely disagree, the corporate media are governed by powerful people with an agenda and it shows to anyone that thinks critically. How much have they got wrong in the last 3 years alone. And everything they have either ignored or smeared has turned out to be true. Many of us saw this at the time, many others are finding out now, after the fact
I was a 60s radical, skeptical as an intellectual and social approach, but still trusting. Started working at a state psychiatric hospital (mostly socialist staff with wild exceptions) and became a Jesus Freak (mostly apolitical cultural conservatives with wild exceptions) about the same time. Rational-seeming decent people who raise families, own businesses, treat psychotics and BPD's, and very pleasantly interact with the world believe an enormous amount of crazy shit and are happy to share it with you.
I don't see any difference between 1970 and 2020.
Re: Obamas birth certificate.
There is a very easy explanation why there are suspicious looking parts in the official scanned version of the certificate. In the timeframe when old documents were digitized, Xerox had a experinmental new scan algorithm as the standard config of their scanners. This was found because of a very bad bug in this algorithm.
This is a phenomenon observed by Jacques Ellul in "Propaganda", where propaganda systems give you real facts but use narrative frameworks to determine how you respond to them. But I think this argument w/r/t censorship is a bit too clever - e.g. in the Infowars example, Alex Jones uses one piece of real evidence to make a bunch of false factual claims about e.g. "crisis actors." That is, in fact, a made-up fact.
Re: the title of the post- Sorrow is an emotion, and I don't imagine I would feel sorry about being right about something. I'm not criticizing the title, I'm actually grateful for the realization of why this colloquialism has always bothered me. If I may over analyze it: person A saying 'sorry I'm right' assumes person B feels sad about the implication that person A is right and person B is wrong. Person A is saying 'sorry' to either empathize or gloat, but if person B is a good rationalist with scout mindset, they actually don't feel sad about updating from a wrong belief to a right belief.
Whether the media lies outright or not is partly a distinction without a difference - the content is still untrustworthy and you'll either tune it out or agree with it depending on your priors. Sure, I'm guessing they're not outright lying, but then I suspect that creatively and systematically misinterpreting facts and using selected quotes from pre approved sources may fall within the common english concept of lying even if you could nitpick to insist that it doesn't.
This all makes me think of the famous Spycatcher trial, where the future Australian Prime Minister Turnbull questioned a British civil servant who had, by omitting key facts, given a false impression of what actually occurred. Turnbull suggested that he had in fact lied, while the diplomat insisted that technically speaking, by not saying an outright falsehood he hadn't lied per se. The civil servant suggested that he had perhaps been 'economical with the truth'. (The wiki page has a great and short transcript of that exchange.) I'm inclined to agree with the broader term: that a series of true facts represented dishonestly constitutes a lie. For the record, the audience at the trial at the time appeared to roughly agree with that definition too.
I think there's a fairly obvious example of the media lying about the 2020 election. The repeatedly say "no evidence", "baseless", and the like. There is plenty of evidence that exists. You even demonstrated some of it with the graph. Regardless of an explanation provided later, that's suspicious.
Evidence is not Proof. The evidence provided is not sufficient to prove the election was stolen. For the most part, people have declined to go look or when audits got forced, stonewalled as best they could. Statistical evidence in particular can never prove any given vote was fraudulent, and can only suggest that something odd was going on.
If they limited themselves to "unproven", then they wouldn't be lying. Instead, they constantly act as if there is no reason to even go looking.
“Safe and effective”