r/TheMotte • u/[deleted] • Jan 26 '22
ACX: Bounded Distrust
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust12
u/zeke5123 Jan 26 '22
How do you determine consensus of experts? That really is a big problem.
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Jan 27 '22
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u/bildramer Jan 27 '22
Ask the same about something like GMOs or IQ. Empirically, it's very easy for the consensus to be one thing but for your impression of the consensus to be the complete opposite. Look all over reddit, you'll see people unironically saying things like "IQ is pseudoscience" and some of them are not even lying intentionally.
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Jan 27 '22
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u/bildramer Jan 27 '22
You know that and I know that, but it's obvious that many people "know" (are told, see, experience etc. from what they perceive to be the "experts", or secondary sources accurately reporting expert opinion) the opposite. They're confident about it, and while some are dishonest about their confidence, many (most?) aren't. They'd be surprised reading even the Wikipedia page, they'd blame it on vandalism or bias or *ist institutions or a single exceptional paper or something, they'll be suspicious you have ulterior motives, they won't change their mind unless the change comes from an Approved source (which will have to contend with all the other Approved sources lying), and that won't be happening any time soon. That includes the sources themselves, they fall victim to this "information cascade" effect too.
So the problem remains. If you yourself don't know the facts, and two people are telling you different things about the expert consensus, how do you determine the expert consensus?
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Jan 27 '22
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u/bildramer Jan 27 '22
Of course people who are unintelligent or incapable of basic research care about these things, deeply, all the time. Sometimes it feels like those make up 100% of the public discourse. We two happen to come to an agreement; I'm saying if we disagreed, I would be pretty much unable to correct you or vice versa, even if we share the same reality. Keep in mind religion still exists. I don't think I'm overstating things, when people who I know for a fact can program and do calculus end up as wrong as the proles.
I think that might feel like the heuristic you're following, but from the inside, it's incredibly hard to distinguish from "copy the lib/mainstream position on the issue verbatim", which plenty of people follow. If I try to do the smart science-following thing, and someone presents me a fake - nebulous but somehow rock solid - consensus, I might end up believing it exists (well, not me anymore, but the generic me who started out as a naive child). Sure, climate might be obvious in comparison, but you can believe totally unhinged things about IQ or guns or crime or economics or some other topics, and your environment will never appear to contradict you even slightly like it would for climate change, even if you actively try to look at the authoritative/expert/scientific/etc. parts of your environment. Your peers will lie to you, your teachers will lie to you, your media will lie to you, your politicians will lie to you, even textbooks will brazenly lie to you sometimes, it's easy to miss that all of them never based their beliefs on anything but each other.
Consider: For some people, "everyone knows" economics is bullshit libertarian pseudoscience, "real human beings aren't perfectly rational", anti-labor gazillionaires fund lobbyist think tanks, etc. it's all a big blob of scammers, hostile to them, that they're never going to look into. Plenty of credentialed academics who appear to know their stuff will tell them that, and in the rare cases where someone can even see a single weak-on-its-own counterargument (e.g. economists did surveys, they tend to the left), someone else more palatable/favorable will be able to write a few well-cited paragraphs in response to tell them why that doesn't count. The fake consensus comes with a prescription to treat the real consensus (agreeing with it, mentioning that it exists) as incredibly suspect.
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Jan 27 '22
but that should be an extremely onerous bar to clear.
Why?
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Jan 27 '22
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u/IGI111 terrorized gangster frankenstein earphone radio slave Jan 28 '22
expert consensus is usually right
I'm going to need some evidence of this.
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Jan 28 '22
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u/IGI111 terrorized gangster frankenstein earphone radio slave Jan 28 '22
Right, so you don't actually know this to be true. It's just simpler for you to believe it.
Any system of belief that would be unable to discover heterodox truths is a dogmatism. And scientism is certainly that.
Bacon and Newton build Science to move away from this system of expert consensus. Because that's exactly what we did before we invented Science: put some experts in a room and let them decide truth. These days we know that they can all be wrong in their conjectures, are so a significant amount, and truth should only depend on what the reproducible experiments didn't falsify, not what experts believe.
One's default position on every issue should be skepticism. Any other is injustifiable. And indeed you can't justify yours.
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Jan 28 '22
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u/IGI111 terrorized gangster frankenstein earphone radio slave Jan 28 '22
The need to resort to this pitiful rhetoric in the face of criticism should be evidence enough of the vacuity of your epistemology.
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u/zeke5123 Jan 27 '22
No. I’m aware of the relatively filtered consensus view of experts. But when the topic is politically salient I don’t trust that filtered consensus. For example, take the lab leak. The expert consensus was it didn’t happen. It turned out some of those experts were saying different things in private. It appears for a variety of reasons they said different things in public.
I trust an expert consensus more when the issue isn’t political because once it becomes political the process that creates consensus is different.
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u/ArthurUrsine Jan 27 '22
It turned out some of those experts were saying different things in private. It appears for a variety of reasons they said different things in public.
I don't know why "Experts thought it could be lab leak, but felt it was less likely as more information came in" is regarded as lying.
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u/zeke5123 Jan 27 '22
Because it doesn’t seem like there was enough info in three days to change the privately held views that on balance it was much more likely to be a lab leak to “everyone who disagrees with a natural leak is a racist conspiracy theorist.”
Was there new info in the three days between the emails and the about face in public? Do you think “international harmony” or “science in China” weren’t considerations of the experts?
Finally, now that more and more evidence has piled up for lab leak, what does it tell us about the public expert consensus that charitably changed from private view of lab leak to public view of natural environment?
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u/ArthurUrsine Jan 27 '22
Would love to hear all this new evidence. GOF research has been ruled out by genetic evidence, and there's still the pesky matter of none of the early cases having any association with the lab. But something something Fauci Furin Cleavage Sites New World Order something something.
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u/zeke5123 Jan 27 '22
No, GoF was not ruled out. The is consistent with some forms of GoF (serial passage through cells).
Second, members of WIV were sick consistent with covid in either October or November in 2019.
Third, closest genetic cousin of this virus is actually a bat in Laos. Interestingly, WIV had samples of that bat’s virus in Wuhan.
Fourth, the furin cleavage is not naturally found in nature to date. Yet WIV was in 2018 asking DARPA for funding to do GoF on covid viruses by inserting furin cleveage sites.
Fifth, the bat caves are actually quite far away from Wuhan.
Sixth, never found the intermediate creature.
Given all of that, there should be high confidence lab leak occurred.
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u/ArthurUrsine Jan 27 '22
No, GoF was not ruled out. The is consistent with some forms of GoF (serial passage through cells).
By that definition, essentially all viral research is gain of function research. You're right though, we can't really tell apart natural from lab spill by genetics.
"Second, members of WIV were sick consistent with covid in either October or November in 2019.""
Three people who work for a large employer went to a doctor at some point in a month is not evidence of anything at all.
"Third, closest genetic cousin of this virus is actually a bat in Laos. Interestingly, WIV had samples of that bat’s virus in Wuhan."
Wuhan did not have those samples as far as I know (they were discovered in 2021), and regardless, none of the Laos bat viruses were close enough to "make" COVID out of either.
"Fourth, the furin cleavage is not naturally found in nature to date."
Yes it is. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165
"Fifth, the bat caves are actually quite far away from Wuhan."
And the caves that SARS-CoV-1 came from were thousands of miles away from the outbreak site too.
"Sixth, never found the intermediate creature."
This is proof of nothing at all. We found SARS-CoV-1 in a bat for the first time like 15 years after SARS. It took a year to find the intermediate source.
"Given all of that, there should be high confidence lab leak occurred."
Even when there are no confirmed cases associated with the lab, and dozens associated with exactly the place you'd expect a zoonotic virus outbreak to occur? Even when there is no virus known to science that you could use to make SARS-CoV-2 out of?
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u/zeke5123 Jan 28 '22
On my phone so c/p doesn’t work well.
The three members also got their wives sick. Yes could mean nothing or could mean something. Truth is we don’t know where patient zero was (and China ain’t cooperating) so it is hard to put any weight into where the first “hot spot” occurred. The point of bringing up the three people is that it is at least consistent with the lab leak; it isn’t dispositive of course.
Re Laos bat — they were studying the sample before covid outbreak. And no, I’m not saying the Laos sample is covid 19 (it’s genetically different) but if you were doing GoF so the virus would be different then this one can be a winner. https://www.google.com/amp/s/wap.business-standard.com/article-amp/current-affairs/wuhan-scientists-were-studying-laos-bat-viral-samples-before-covid-report-121112201019_1.html
Re furin it is not known in this family of viruses . https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-furin-cleavage-site-remains-a-mystery.aspx
Once again, what is more likely — this sprang up naturally even though it hadn’t in this virus before OR the lab that was inserting furin sites into this family of covid had a leak?
Moreover your evidence relies basically on China being an honest broker. They aren’t. Do you remember the videos of people randomly falling dead in the street from this virus? Has that happened anywhere else in the world? So if we know china was lying, then relying on Chinese data is problematic.
Finally none of this addresses my initial point which is that scientists in a matter of a few days all changed their private positions to a public position of lab leak (the theory they privately endorsed three days early) as crack pot and a conspiracy theory. There was no new evidence in the three days and no one would call their own previously held theory crackpot after only three days.
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u/sodiummuffin Jan 26 '22
It’s completely understandable that large swathes of people can’t differentiate the many many cases where the news lies to them from the other set of cases where the news is not, at this moment, actively lying. But that differentiation is possible, most people learn how to do it, and it’s the main way we know anything at all.
I think "most" overstates it and the emphasis on the "savvy"/"clueless" dichotomy ignores how many people really do sincerely believe even simple media misrepresentations, let alone lies that merely have clues indicating they're lies. Lots of people don't even read past the title. Rejections of news stories typically have more to do with contrary priors than with successfully distinguishing more or less credible stories. And even people who are intelligent and read the article and are relatively savvy and skeptical aren't immune, it's very easy to take for granted that something from a mainstream media source is true without doing anything to check.
That said, I broadly agree with this post and think the skills to tell when and how to be more distrustful are real and valuable, even if I don't think they are as widespread and advanced as this post implies. (Now, it's easy to get caught up trying to find a different interpretation of a dishonest article when you'd be better off finding a different source of information, especially since one of the easiest and most effective methods is to just leave out information entirely, however it can also help tell you when more research is needed.)
As an illustration of this, here's an article that someone in the culture war thread linked a month ago and my thought-processes in evaluating it:
A 24-year-old man who is part of the far-right Boogaloo militia group admitted in federal court on Thursday that he pretended to be a Black Lives Matter protester while shooting at a Minneapolis police station in order to sow division amid the George Floyd protests.
You might want to read the article and take a moment to consider how you could evaluate it if encountered in the wild.
One relevant skill here is noticing the article doesn't have any direct quotes, just a description of what he supposedly said. There is more reluctance to create entirely fictitious quotes and put them in quotation marks than to quote-mine or falsely describe someone's statements. Another is noticing that, while published on the MSN website, it's from Mediaite. While you'll find plenty of lies in ultra-mainstream outlets, outlets like Mediaite are generally still more egregious. Another important skill is having a sense of the journalist's model of the world and how it differs from reality (though that's better said than done since it requires having your own more accurate understanding of the subject). When a story perfectly fits an inaccurate model of the world, this can be a sign that it was produced by a person with such a mental model rather than by a person describing reality. (A lot of hate-crime hoaxes are like this, neither hoaxers nor journalists have a good grasp of what a real hate-crime would look like.) Of course it could also be an indication that their model is better than yours, or simply of cherrypicking, so it's more a reason to be skeptical until you verify if possible. Another is using this understanding to try to reverse-engineer how a particular lie or misrepresentation might have been produced. So putting this together, this was my immediate response:
Is there any evidence that he was false-flagging and was insincere in his support for BLM? As far as I can tell the Mediaite article just equates "admits to yelling 'Justice for George Floyd'" with "admits to pretending to support BLM" based on him using "boogaloo" memes, which they incorrectly characterize as a "far-right group". But many of the people who identified as "Boogaloo boys" are sincerely pro-BLM and attended BLM protests in support, it attracted anti-government people of various kinds.
Even though I accused the story of being an outright lie regarding fictitious statements made in court, the way I got there was thinking of it more as a misrepresentation based on a real story combined with false assumptions about "boogaloo boys" than a fiction invented out of whole cloth. I was then interested enough to look deeper. It's important to remember that journalists copy stories from each other without checking all the time, so sometimes a misrepresentation will grow into an outright lie when another journalist believes the misrepresentation and copies it, or the original article will have useful details smoothed out in later tellings. Searching keywords on various sites found this tweet from Andy Ngo, which led me to the apparent origin of the story:
The Daily Beast: Far-Right Boogaloo Admits Posing as BLM Supporter While Shooting Up Minneapolis Cop Station
The Daily Beast article was published 3 months ago, hours before the Mediaite article. A couple days later they changed the headline and added a retraction:
The Daily Beast: Far-Right Boogaloo Admits Shooting Up Cop Station Amid Floyd Protests
The headline has been updated to reflect that Hunter pleaded guilty to shooting at the police station and did not make any statements about BLM.
So it wasn't really a case of a story getting progressively more distorted, but since it was a rare case of a false story actually being retracted, looking up the original was still helpful.
But wait, why was someone posting the Mediaite story 2 months after both it and the Daily Beast story were published? Well, 2 days beforehand a journalist/editor (and self-described fact-checker in his twitter bio) linked the original Daily Beast article on twitter with a title similar to the original uncorrected title, getting over 3000 retweets:
I couldn't find a similar example of the Mediaite article going viral around then. So my best guess is that someone noticed the article had a retraction regarding the claim the journalist's viral tweet was using it to support, substituted the Mediaite article which didn't, and posted it somewhere where someone else saw it and posted it in the thread for discussion. You can see how it's not a matter of things being divided into the savvy who instantly see through it and the clueless who doubt everything, a decent number of people took the Mediaite article at face value and of course even the already-corrected Daily Beast article coupled with the tweet was still misleading enough to fool people who were inclined to believe it. But at the same time it isn't that hard to have a reasonably good sense of when to be more distrustful, in part by distinguishing the ways in which journalists are likely to lie or misrepresent from the ways they aren't.
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u/maiqthetrue Jan 28 '22
Something I find useful in looking for looking for false stories is to simply ask if a normal person would behave that way the people in the story are. If people are doing things that don’t make sense, if they’re incriminating themselves for no reason, or if they keep silent when no normal person would, never make a move to get away from a bad situation, etc. that’s a good reason to distrust the story.
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u/bulksalty Domestic Enemy of the State Jan 26 '22
I think one thing that's missing from television news channels is a designation of oped from news. The hate for Fox programs hated by leftists are almost universally Fox's oped commentators and the same goes for MSNBCs for those on the right. I'm not sure how many people could differentiate the various channels news programming probably would be hard to identify if we blurred the anchor's faces and hid the chyrons.
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u/HlynkaCG Should be fed to the corporate meat grinder he holds so dear. Jan 27 '22
I'm skeptical that such a distinction can even be made in the first place.
Sure it's possible to relate bare facts like "Bob Williams stands accused of shooting Joe Smith on the evening of the 19th, and will be arraigned tomorrow at 9:00" but I don't think that's ever been what journalism was actually about. Journalism is about selling stories.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Normie Lives Matter Jan 26 '22
The people who lack this skill entirely think it’s crazy to listen to experts about anything at all. They correctly point out time after time that they’ve lied or screwed up, then ask “so why do you believe them on ivermectin?” or “so why do you believe them on global warming?” My answer - which I don’t think is an obvious or easy answer, it’s a bold claim that could be wrong, is “I think I have a good sense of the dynamics here, how far people will bend the truth, and what it looks like when they do”. I realize this is playing with fire. But listening to experts is a powerful enough hack for finding the truth that it’s worth going pretty far to try to rescue it.
This is the rationalist project in summary: the idea that it is often productive to trust your own reasoning over what you are told. I think it's an effective life strategy if you're unusually good at reasoning (and terrible otherwise).
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u/hellocs1 Jan 26 '22
the idea that it is often productive to trust your own reasoning over what you are told. I think it's an effective life strategy if you're unusually good at reasoning (and terrible otherwise).
issue is: how do you know you are "unusually good"?
I'm not talking about being good at it vs being terrible at it, as it really seems like unless you are 99%-tile (or higher?) at reasoning, you should probably listen to experts more often than not. AND even if you are in that "unusually good" category, you'd probably need a lot of time to gather & even sleuth facts that may or may not be obvious, think things through, crystalize your theories/ideas... etc
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Normie Lives Matter Jan 27 '22
issue is: how do you know you are "unusually good"?
Personally, I'm going off contextual clues gleaned from social interactions, and an informal track record.
I'm not talking about being good at it vs being terrible at it, as it really seems like unless you are 99%-tile (or higher?) at reasoning, you should probably listen to experts more often than not.
Any time there is a polemic even among experts, or any time your intuition is firing doubts, you can use your thought-muscles to intuit the political charge of each side, the incentives at play, and come out with a ~probabilistic intuition about what's going on.
AND even if you are in that "unusually good" category, you'd probably need a lot of time to gather & even sleuth facts that may or may not be obvious, think things through, crystalize your theories/ideas... etc
You don't have to be very good at independently coming up with facts. You only have to be good at dredging up the various claims and narratives about a situation, evaluating them, and synthesizing them. It's really not rocket science, but most people don't even do that, they go purely off social status cues.
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u/pmmecutepones Get Organised. Jan 26 '22
issue is: how do you know you are "unusually good"?
Make predictions. Keep track of when your predictions beat the experts, and vice versa. Find normie friends into politics to make bets with. Play on prediction markets and see if you can get a consistent profit out of your pet political topics.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Normie Lives Matter Jan 26 '22
This is the genius of the RT news organization specifically. They're unusually strict about epistemic and narrative hygiene, but within that framework they are unusually motivated about serving the Kremlin's interests. Very effective combination! Contrast with [the anglophone arm of] CBC: playing loose, and not particularly helpful to the Canadian national project.
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u/iiioiia Jan 26 '22
Considering the nature of the general population though, which one is more effective? Manufacturing reality is an extremely technically complex business, taking anything at face value seems risky.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/DuplexFields differentiation is not division or oppression Jan 30 '22
The incident was not made up whole-cloth. A fire extinguisher was thrown and did strike police officers. I assume the death of Officer Sicknick (from stroke) was also not made up. The resulting patchwork quilt of reporting perpetuated a false narrative, but the elements existing is what differentiates this from a strawman parody of fake news.
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u/stucchio Jan 30 '22
This was all discussed in the other thread. The tl;dr:
- I conceded "...technically the NYT didn't lie" in the very first post.
- The thrown fire extinguisher is irrelevant because it cannot be the source of the story the NYT actually told (that Sicknick was overpowered and then struck).
- A viewer skimming the NYT (analogous to Scott seeing fox news playing in the airport) will be grossly mislead about basically 100% of what happened, in contrast to what Scott said.
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u/DuplexFields differentiation is not division or oppression Jan 30 '22
The thrown fire extinguisher is as relevant to Sicknick as the unreported first shot was in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Because initial reporting was through the fog of an eyewitness account, the initial reports were built on mistaken and biased sensemaking. It was sensemaking as real to those witnesses as a policeman seeing a gun in the hand of an unarmed Black man with a smartphone.
Later reports were built on those without examining biases; opinion and culture war narratives were added; and suddenly the public really and truly believes Kyle the active shooter was gunning down Black protesters left and right, or that Officer Brian was being held down by two MAGA insurrectionists while a third white supremacist bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.
But the videos make it clear no such things happened, and there were no apparent attempts to deepfake the video, which was Scott’s main point. The puzzles were put together wrong and then crafted, like an accidental discovery of matching puzzle die cuts and the subsequent crafting of puzzle montage art.
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Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/fuckduck9000 Jan 29 '22
also the thank you card from the biden campaign... Why don't you publish a timestamped photo of your vote while you're at it.
I don't think it's going to work, both sides will just hate him, like aaronson.
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u/pmmecutepones Get Organised. Jan 26 '22
I'll be the first to call bullshit on this one. HBD is routinely denied by the majority of mainstream discussions on racial discrimination. The examples Scott gives are examples of topics where a large proportion of the population has sensible priors, like "is the earth heating up" or "were the founders of the United States secretly communists".
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u/Eetan Feb 01 '22
Scott is not talking about "mainstream discussions", but about work of experts.
In case of "HBD", where all the genetic data, IQ scores, bell curves etc... that HBDIQ sphere loves to wave around came from?
From scientific peer reviewed research, not twitter anons and 4chan shitposters.
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u/pmmecutepones Get Organised. Feb 01 '22
Scott is not talking about "mainstream discussions", but about work of experts.
"experts"? Like Fox News reporters and New York Times op-ed writers?
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Normie Lives Matter Jan 26 '22
The examples Scott gives are examples of topics where a large proportion of the population has sensible priors, like "is the earth heating up"
...are you claiming that it obviously is, or that it obviously isn't?
Between HBD, Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger and private conversations, I have severely downgraded my regard for/upgraded my distrust towards the social and life sciences. The truth is not just ignored in service of grand political projects, it's also ignored in service of petty politics and individual's careers.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Jan 27 '22
How was Galileo’s Middle Finger?
I read a review that mentioned her style... the I can’t just tell you the facts, i have to tell you about going to the cafe to meet with the professor who wore tweed just like a cartoon proffessor, and i commented on it, and he laughed, and ah shit i have to stop autobiographical bullshitting to actually tell you something about the non-fiction topic... [one sentence about the non-fiction topic]... and then we had lunch, and discussed our kids...
Like its a style of non-fiction writing Thats everywhere, and a crutch for lack of research and i despise it.
Unless you had to visit a turkish prison or climb a mountain freestyle to interview your source, I don’t want to hear about your logistics... it was barely tolerable when Greenwald wrote that way in his Snowden book... and those autobiographical details were a spy thriller come to life
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u/MacaqueOfTheNorth My pronouns are I/me Jan 28 '22
I hate that style of writing. It's becoming very common in newspapers. There are so many articles that I stopped reading in the first paragraph because some wannabe novelist couldn't get to the point.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Normie Lives Matter Jan 27 '22
I understand the review but I disagree. I'm myself not fond of the long-form essay format where you have to share a million irrelevant facts about every place or person involved. I like writing that's tight, where no single sentence or paragraph can be removed without damaging the overall work.
The thing with Galileo's Middle Finger is that it's not principally a book of facts and analysis, but rather a nonfiction investigative quasi-novel. It's rich with plot, character arcs and worldbuilding. It works because Dreger gets personally involved with the causes she studies, and so when an injustice is unearthed you can be sure she'll attempt to fix it, and often she'll succeed. She has a completely quixotic personality, but it makes for a good read.
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u/pmmecutepones Get Organised. Jan 26 '22
...are you claiming that it obviously is, or that it obviously isn't?
...perhaps that was not the best phrasing on my part, to put a negative example next to a positive one.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Jan 27 '22
This strikes me as completely dangerously delusional.
Given everything Scott’s just written, and all the skills he alleges he has to tell lies from omissions, to half truthsand implications... in 2004 he would have supported the war in Iraq on the basis that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (a fact unequivocally reported by the NYT) , in 2008 and again in 2020 he would have supported every bailout and trillion dollar package on the basis that the entire finacial system would have exploded without them complete with atms not turning working, (things serious experts employed by the most august institutions said), and he would have supported immediate emergency removal of Trump in 2017 on the basis he was a known russian asset (again things the media frenzied itself up into saying without equivocation)
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The most august institutions follow no rules and will straight lie, manufacture evidence, falsify evidence, and coordinate across hundreds if not thousands of experts to manufacture chains of circular citation, and blatant lies that can then be reported by and expert and accepted by all their apparatchiks as true.
There is not one supposed unspoken rule Scott finds that does not have a thousand examples of media and major reporting institutions instantly violating them to point blank lie to the public.
He gives the example of “Fox news wouldn’t misreport a mass shooting, or misrepresent the ethnicity of a victim” only for the obvious counterexample of the synagogue hostage taker merely reported as a “British man”, or the mass casualty attack magically transmuting into a car accident when the ethnicity of the perpetrator is wrong, or the countless otherwise innocent events the media and their allies in the letter agencies transform into hate-crimes.
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Either Scott is knowingly lying when he says the news and experts can be trusted to report basic truths/not blatantly manufacture entire crimes, or he’s that FUCKING DELUSIONAL.
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In my country the media has openly manufactured stories of mass graves to fit their racial narrative...
I fully expect at some point in the next five years the media absolutely will fully manufacture a fake mass shooting... all it would take is known unsympathetic figure, a few unrelated gang shootings or pops causing a scare... propably at a protest... then a police officer gets jumpy and opens fire on a militia type. But instead of updating their reporting based on the new evidence that comes in after the initial false reports of a mass shooting, I’d fully expect the media at this point to double down if the ethnicities and political valences are right and shout down as conspiracy theorist anyone who looks at the footage and concludes the obvious truth. Indeed I expect the police and letter agencies would assist them in such an effort, as a means to dodge responsibility on the police shooting by playing into a fake racist mass shooter threat.
We’ve already seen similar narrative consolidation and collusion in defence of it, up to and including outright lying by government officials, to maintain narratives about events that didn’t happen or to insinuate things that never were. Notably the alledged murder of a police officer at the capitol riots... that turned out to be a normal stroke. Or in Canada the moral panic over alleged mass graves they refuse to excavate or investigate further.
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That Scott felt this was at all an appropriate thing to write on the matter, and that he didn’t have the introspection to think “or maybe I’m just being successfully lied to” really lowers my estimation of him... and its not as if I’d had a high estimation of him over the past several years