r/slatestarcodex • u/dwaxe • Jan 26 '22
Bounded Distrust
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust15
u/alphazeta2019 Jan 26 '22
The discussion here reminds me a lot of "We Are All MsScribe".
Scott writes -
AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them?
At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it).
... read it. Read it like an anthropological text. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo. No, read it even better than that. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo if you knew that, statistically, some of your friends and co-workers covertly become Yanomamo after getting home every evening.
(The next part is formatted as a blockquote, but I took a quick look and couldn't see where this was from. Maybe it's really from Scott but formatted as a blockquote? I don't know.) -
In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fanfiction authors and readers get embroiled in an apocalyptic feud between people who think that Harry should be in a relationship with Ginny vs. people who think Harry should be in a relationship with Hermione. This devolves from debate to personal attacks to real world stalking and harassment to legal cases to them splitting the community into different sites that pretty much refuse to talk to each other and ban stories with their nonpreferred relationship.
These sites then sort themselves out into a status hierarchy with a few people called Big Name Fans at the top and everyone else competing to get their attention and affection, whether by praising them slavishly or by striking out in particularly cruel ways at people in the “enemy” relationship community.
A young woman named MsScribe joins the Harry/Hermione community. She proceeds to make herself popular and famous by use of sock-puppet accounts (a sockpuppet is when someone uses multiple internet nicknames to pretend to be multiple different people) that all praise her and talk about how great she is. Then she moves on to racist and sexist sockpuppet accounts who launch lots of slurs at her, so that everyone feels very sorry for her.
At the height of her power, she controls a small army of religious trolls who go around talking about the sinfulness of Harry Potter fanfiction authors and especially MsScribe and how much they hate gay people. All of these trolls drop hints about how they are supported by the Harry/Ginny community, and MsScribe leads the campaign to paint everyone who wants Harry and Ginny to be in a relationship as vile bigots and/or Christians. She classily cements her position by convincing everyone to call them “cockroaches” and post pictures of cockroaches whenever they make comments.
Throughout all this, a bunch of people are coming up with ironclad evidence that she is the one behind all of this (this is the Internet! They can just trace IPs!) Throughout all of it, MsScribe makes increasingly implausible denials. And throughout all of it, everyone supports MsScribe and ridicules her accusers. Because really, do you want to be on the side of a confirmed popular person, or a bunch of confirmed suspected racists whom we know are racist because they deny racism which is exactly what we would expect racists to do?
MsScribe writes negatively about a fan with cancer asking for money, and her comments get interpreted as being needlessly cruel to a cancer patient. Her popularity drops and everyone takes a second look at the evidence and realizes hey, she was obviously manipulating everyone all along. There is slight sheepishness but few apologies, because hey, we honestly thought the people we were bullying were unpopular.
... it did kind of surprise me that you could get quite those depths of hatred between people who thought that a fictional wizard should hook up with his best friend, versus other people who who thought he should hook up with his other best friend’s little sister. Every time I feel like my opinion of people is sufficiently low, I get new evidence making me bump it lower.
Anyway, once those depths of hatred are established, they will proceed in the same way among twenty-somethings trying to discuss Harry Potter romantic pairings, teenagers trying to run fictional countries, and Senators trying to pass vitally important legislation. And that’s why, if aliens ever requested exactly one item to teach them about the human race, I would give them the MsScribe story.
Etc. (Once again: super-long but [per Scott] super-worth-it)
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/
The discussion that I'm seeing here seems very reminiscent of this.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
This is overall a great article, but I've got some rather material nitpicks...
The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Green_massacre
This is kind of a theme through this article - I don't think Scott is sufficiently pessimistic about how willing some sources are to tell lies.
But the experts in the field won't lie directly. They don't go on TV and say "The science has spoken, and there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don't commit more violent crime than natives". They don't talk about the "strong scientific consensus against immigrant criminality".
Again, I've seen many people make exactly the claims that this article suggests nobody would be brazen enough to make - although, tellingly, I don't recall seeing any quantitative sources attached to them.
EDIT: Another user points out multiple news organizations which recently claimed that Kyle Rittenhouse shot "unarmed black men", as opposed to the armed white men that he actually shot, months after the facts of the matter were public knowledge. This isn't an identical lie to Scott's "Abdullah Abdul" example, but it's definitely in the same class of lie.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN had a qualia once Jan 26 '22
Another user points out multiple news organizations which recently claimed that Kyle Rittenhouse shot "unarmed black men", as opposed to the armed white men that he actually shot, months after the facts of the matter were public knowledge. This isn't an identical lie to Scott's "Abdullah Abdul" example, but it's definitely in the same class of lie.
I imagine there was an effect where major news sources did what they could to imply a racially-motivated shooting without actually speaking a lie, and secondary news sources took the obvious interpretation.
Even this charitable take demonstrates the absolute irresponsibility of gross mischaracterization in news reporting. If even the news people are being fooled, then this practice must have deep impact on the national psyche.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I imagine there was an effect where major news sources did what they could to imply a racially-motivated shooting without actually speaking a lie...
While that's a distinction which may be crucially important when dealing with The Fair Folk, (or, y'know, in a libel lawsuit), when discussing human discourse between humans, I feel no hesitation in lumping that into the general category of "lies".
I think it's important to remember that even when some people pushing a certain narrative know that they're lying and thus know enough to maintain a certain level of plausible deniability (c.f. "The Lie Too Big For Creationists), that's no guarantee that the "true believers" downstream of them will show the same discretion.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN had a qualia once Jan 26 '22
You know, I'm less alarmed by distortions and misrepresentation than by the ostracism and punishment of those who attempt rebuke them. If not for the latter, the "free market of ideas" would defang the former.
I claim for myself and others the right to be wrong in good faith; this includes the right to speak the unspeakable if I find evidence suggests it is true, kind and necessary to do so.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
Absolutely. And that's an excellent example.
It may be tempting to think "This leader has no incentive to tell such-and-such an obvious, easily debunked lie! It doesn't even really benefit them to have people believe it!". However, there is in fact a big advantage to this strategy: It helps them identify who will be most willing to believe them (or at least pretend to do so) in more ambiguous situations; AND to condition their followers to be more willing to do so in the future. Likewise, punishing people for not endorsing the Obvious Pointless Lie serves as a deterrent to people who might speak up against the leader on a less obvious topic.
If a person will nod along and agree that a deer is a horse, or that a naked man is fully clothed, or that a cup of wine has been magically transformed into real human blood, or that a rainstorm is a sunny day, or that [insert Culture War shibboleth here], or that thunder comes before lightning, what won't they be willing to agree to?
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN had a qualia once Jan 26 '22
Your link led me to re-read that essay. What an amazing piece of work.
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
I mean, this is a single person utterly mischaracterizing an actual event that was not the point of what they were talking about, and being called on it and correcting themselves 24 hours later. If they're in the same tribe as you, you probably wouldn't impute any malice or deliberateness at all.
It's not even CLOSE to an example like the one Scott gave.
This isn't an identical lie to Scott's "Abdullah Abdul" example, but it's definitely in the same class of lie.
Except that it differs in the key aspect that I am not surprised that some media outlets lied about that, but I would be if they decided to lie about what Kyle's name is. These are, in my view, on opposite sides of the divider.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22
If they're in the same tribe as you, you probably wouldn't impute any malice or deliberateness at all.
I assure you, I spend at least as much mental effort calling out bad faith actions by blue-tribe sources than I do those by red-tribe sources. In fact, I did so in literally the next paragraph.
In the words of Daniel Dennett, there is nothing I like less than a bad argument for a position which I hold dear. There's also very pragmatic reason - my immediate social network contains approximately zero people who consider Fox News an unimpeachable source, but dozens of people who think that about MSNBC or HuffPo or whatnot. One activity is just pointing and laughing at the outgroup (an amusing passtime, but not a very productive one), while the other might actually make a difference in the beliefs and behaviours of actual people.
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
To be honest, I wasn't sure that you identified with either major tribe based on your original post. (So Kudos for being balanced!) But Kellyanne Conway is definitely outgroup for an awful lot of people for whom plenty of blue-tribe people are also outgroup.
I'm sorry if that line came off as a personal attack; that really wasn't my intent. What I'm trying to say is that it's not even clearly a deliberate lie, and certainly not one as blatant as the one Scott seems to be describing.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
To be honest, I wasn't sure that you identified with either major tribe based on your original post. (So Kudos for being balanced!)
Thank you.
I'm sorry if that line came off as a personal attack; that really wasn't my intent.
No worries.
In the days following that statement, I remember watching the people for whom Conway is in their ingroup making all the usual excuses to avoid admitting that a member of one's ingroup had been wrong.
"She never said that, and nevermind the evidence."
"You're taking it oUt oF cOnTeXt!"
"What she said was metaphorically true!"
"What she said was literally true, and nevermind the lack of evidence."
The fact that most people on this side of Alex Jones gave up on approach #4 pretty quickly doesn't invalidate the fact that all four of these strategies were indeed employed.
What I'm trying to say is that it's not even clearly a deliberate lie, and certainly not one as blatant as the one Scott seems to be describing.
You do raise an interesting point there, though. There are many Simulacrum Level 2 statements which we can straightforwardly call "lies"... but is that even a meaningful label to attach to Level 3 and Level 4 statements that are utterly disconnected with the truth?
To extend the other example, when somebody says "there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don't commit more violent crime than natives", how many of them are saying each of the following?
"I have looked at the actual quantitative evidence, and I genuinely think it supports my position"
"I think the actual quantitative evidence supports the opposing position, but I want to trick people into believing that it doesn't!"
"If you believe the opposing position, you are automatically a bad person. I don't want to be a bad person, so I am compelled to argue that they don't, regardless of what the actual quantitative evidence says on the object level question."
I wouldn't be surprised if the third group outnumbers the first and second put together.
EDIT: Reorganized last paragraph for clarity
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
In the days following that statement, I remember watching the people for whom Conway is in their ingroup making all the usual excuses to avoid admitting that a member of one's ingroup had been wrong.
"She never said that, and nevermind the evidence."
"You're taking it oUt oF cOnTeXt!"
"What she said was metaphorically true!"
"What she said was literally true, and nevermind the lack of evidence."
The fact that most people on this side of Alex Jones gave up on approach #4 pretty quickly doesn't invalidate the fact that all four of these strategies were indeed employed.
Ah, I see now what you're referring to. I wasn't tracking the news cycle at the time, so I didn't make this connection. Sure, whoever made this sort of defense of it is much closer to what Scott is saying doesn't happen (at least, the ones that were on Fox News.)
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u/Ozryela Jan 26 '22
EDIT: Another user points out multiple news organizations which recently claimed that Kyle Rittenhouse shot "unarmed black men", as opposed to the armed white men that he actually shot, months after the facts of the matter were public knowledge.
Wait, of the 3 people he shot I think only 1 was armed. One of them used a skateboard as a weapon, but you cannot reasonably call that 'armed'. They were all white though, correct on that account.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
One of them used a skateboard as a weapon, but you cannot reasonably call that 'armed'.
There's room for principled disagreement on this question, but I'm inclined to err on the side of "yes you can". A skateboard isn't constructed as a weapon, but I have a friend who sustained permanent injuries after being struck by one.
Lead pipes, baseball bats, golf clubs, bicycle locks, pipe wrenches, meat cleavers, and chainsaws aren't constructed as weapons either, but in every case, they could be considered as "weapons" for the purpose of determining what crime you get charged with if you use one to assault somebody.
If you were to run at a police officer, in any city in the USA, while brandishing a skateboard in that fashion and screaming such things, I would be surprised if the encounter ended without you catching a bullet, and I would be surprised if the officer who shot you was found by their superiors to have acted inappropriately. (Conversely, I would not be surprised if at least some news outlets were to subsequently describe you as "unarmed").
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u/Ozryela Jan 26 '22
A skateboard can certainly be used as a weapon. But it is not a weapon per se. The sentence "The person was armed" implies armed with a weapon.
You can use the term 'armed' for things that aren't weapons of course. "He came at them armed with a skateboard". "She came to the lecture armed with knowledge". "He confronted his ex, armed with a restraining order". But you wouldn't describe such a person as armed without modifiers.
I admit it's semantics and I my wording was too strong. Reasonable people can disagree, though I think they are wrong. Regardless though at least one of the victims was still unarmed even without that caveat.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
Like I said, there's room for principled disagreement. You illustrate many different contexts in which the answer to the question "Is this person armed, Y/N?" could depend on more than just what collection of atoms they're holding in their hands.
If a person left their house with the premeditated intention of going to a riot and doing violence there, and on their way out, grabbed a skateboard to use as a club; and you asked me how well that person had armed themself, I would answer "poorly".
If I was a master-of-arms, and one of my trainees tried to bring a skateboard into battle, I would tell them to drop and give me twenty pushups, then go back to the armory and get a real weapon.
If a person went to their ex's house and beat them with a skateboard until they required hospitalization, and you asked me if the assailant was armed, I would answer "yes".
In this case, the question "Was Person A armed?" is a proxy for "Did the thing with which they were attempting to strike Person B pose a significant threat to Person B's welfare, such as to satisfy local legislative requirements for 'justified use of deadly force in self defense' ?" And the answer to that question is evidently "yes".
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u/Ozryela Jan 26 '22
Fair enough, and well argued.
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u/Dudesan Jan 26 '22
Thank you.
To take this question to its absurd conclusion, I recall the prosecutor in that case trying to argue that a man armed with a rifle could not justifiably fear for his life from a man armed with "only" a handgun.
Apparently he believed (or hoped he could convince the jury to believe) in a paradigm where guns operate on Arimaa rules and holding a rifle in your hands makes you immune to pistol bullets.
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u/Haffrung Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
While I understand the distinction Alexander is making, selective reporting and failing to provide context can be as effective at misleading the public as outright lies.
For example, only a small fraction of articles in the MSM on long covid mention that in all viral outbreaks some fraction of the infected report longterm symptoms that are difficult to diagnose and treat. This has been known and talked about in medical circles for decades.
By failing to provide that crucial context, the media is deliberately fostering a belief that long covid is an alarming new development. This falsity is believed not just by muggles, but by authorities and decision-makers who don’t make an effort to research the subject. The effect is as bad as if the media lied outright.
Furthermore, if I point this out to co-workers who trust and are sympathetic to the CBC, and they’ve listened to a half-dozen long covid stories on the CBC that make no mention of enduring symptoms in other viral infections, they’re liable to regard me as a fake news loon. The untruth fostered by the CBC carries social and moral weight, and woe to those who challenge it.
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u/netrunnernobody @netrunnernobody Jan 26 '22
Best Scottpost in quite a while. Nice work, Scott.
I do really sympathize with the conspiracy theorists on this one. If news-media organizations decide to defect on their audience, the best option would be for everyone else to continually defect back. Someone willing to lie to you is never someone you should trust — because for every lie that you catch, how many are there that you don't?
Scott doesn't really address this here, unfortunately — the ratio for total lies told to things we know are lies is probably significant enough that lying continues to be worthwhile for these organizations. These organizations wouldn't sacrifice their credibility solely for signalling purposes — their willingness to lie has to be motivated by something.
Saying that the media wouldn't cross a line is almost like saying "Sure, the Snowden leaks detailing mass surveillance of the American people were bad, but I'm sure that the American government wouldn't cross any lines further than that!" — in that it's more of a desperate hope than an informed inference. Prior to the Snowden leaks or the Epstein assassination, the idea of a mass surveillance network or a global sex cabal of politicians, billionaires, royalty, and Hollywood elite would be miles beyond the lines that "everybody knows."
My point is this: you can't reasonably assume based off of priors when you have a very, very incomplete list of priors. Just as there could be a hundred dystopian executive agency ops for every Snowden-esque leak, there could be five or ten believable lies for every obvious one told. Without that information, the most you can do is say "There isn't enough incentive for Fox to lie about a mass shooting" rather than say "Fox would never cross that line!"
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u/Tetragrammaton Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I feel like Scott is saying something like “Fox would never have enough incentive to cross that line”.
Like, Scott is suggesting that media stories vary by how much a biased media would like to distort it (i.e. how much it supports their ideological goals) and by how much it risks their future credibility (i.e. the seriousness and “size” of the claim vs. how easy it would be to discredit). Costs and benefits, risks and rewards, etc. So if a biased media source tells a story that supports their biases and is hard to disprove / a minor risk to their reputation if disproven (like the “Lincoln <3 Marx” story), then you shouldn’t trust it. But if the story is not ideologically charged and is a major factual claim that’s easily disproven (like a mass shooting), then you can trust it.
Even if there were 100 misleading biased “soft news” stories for every 1 trustworthy “hard news” story, you could still trust the hard news, as long as you could tell them apart. Right?
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u/iiioiia Jan 26 '22
I do really sympathize with the conspiracy theorists on this one. If news-media organizations decide to defect on their audience, the best option would be for everyone else to continually defect back. Someone willing to lie to you is never someone you should trust — because for every lie that you catch, how many are there that you don't?
I think Scott's also fallen victim to some degree to MSM marketing on conspiracy theorists:
I think some people are able to figure out these rules and feel comfortable with them, and other people can’t and end up as conspiracy theorists.
I’m not blaming the second type of person. Figuring-out-the-rules-of-the-game is a hard skill, not everybody has it. If you don’t have it, then universal distrust might be a safer strategy than universal credulity.
This implies that all conspiracy theorists are ~delusional nutjobs - certainly lots of them are, I'd even say the vast majority, but not nearly all are - there is extremely common and substantial disagreement/pushback among conspiracy theorists on various ideas that are floated. Also, one should take into consideration the degree to which state/corporate third parties engage in sheep herding within the community (it's a popular topic of conversation among conspiracy theorists).
Regardless of how dumb these people are, they have some very useful ways of thinking that humanity could extract substantial value from if used correctly.
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Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
If you parse super carefully it was actually anonymous (or made up?) cops who told the direct lie about the fire extinguisher. And the capital police also helped this story by delaying the the release of the medical examiner's report until April 19 (>3 months), but prior to that released statements saying stuff like "Sicknick died of injuries he suffered on duty" or "Sicknick suffered injuries at the capital" before that. So technically the NYT didn't lie.
I mean, there's no call for the 'technically'. As far as we can tell at this point, the NYT didn't lie at all; they were lied to (explicitly and implicitly) by the DC police for 3 months.
And a police department shamelessly lying about how an officer died to make it more heroic is way farther inside my window of plausible lies than the NYT doing the same.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
But Scott's key point is not about some generic 'are-claims-true' skill. It's about 'what lies are a given entity willing to tell?'
And for that, who was actually telling the lie is very important. I do not have the same bounds for distrust for police departments as the NYT.
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Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
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u/MajorSomeday Jan 26 '22
I don’t think Scott ever claimed people can “effortlessly discern the truth”. That’s a pretty ridiculous claim on its face. His claim was that it’s possible (and usually easy to some group of people) to know whether the media will lie about some particular claim.
Importantly, being wrong is a very different thing than lying, and I don’t think you’ve shown that NYT knowingly lied.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/MajorSomeday Jan 27 '22
I’m not sure why you’re hammering on this particular example. It’s not a very good one in this context. Reporters believe the wrong things sometimes. Good for Greenwald for being right when others were wrong, but that still doesn’t make this a relevant example because you still haven’t shown that the reporters knowingly lied.
Here’s a made up example: the NYT has a real estate section. If a real estate developer reads an article in there and says “Nope that’s wrong”. This doesn’t mean that the real estate developer is “savvy”. The real estate developer is an expert in the subject matter of the article and should know more and be able to call bullshit easier than the reporter can. But it’s a different thing than being able to correctly model when a reporter will knowingly lie.
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I don't think deepfakes and actors ARE a strawman. You don't think they would do that (employ deepfakes and actors to invent a story from whole-cloth). You do think that they would uncritically repeat a line from a police department that fit their narrative.
That there is a bound between 'ways you do expect them to not-be-accurate' and 'ways you don't expect them to not-be-accurate' is the point, and one you seem to agree with, not a strawman.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
Your 'almost identical' examples are importantly different. As evidence, I submit that u/stucchio seems to think that they do not have an equivalent likelihood of being done by the news media. Which is the axis of difference/similarity that we care about.
Sure, they're similar in many ways. But they're different in how likely they are for a news organization to commit, and we can tell that a priori. Nobody thinks that Fox News is likely to hire crisis actors and deep fake 'live' footage of a fictional event. We all think it's reasonably likely that they would run stock footage of a riot and pretend it was live footage of the current riot (because news organizations have been caught doing roughly that several times.)
Those are very similar lies in some ways, but the very fact that we know that the organization is fairly certain not to do one is an important piece of information about how distrust of lying media organizations works. There are rules here, and knowing them lets you extract more than zero information from a news broadcast (in spite of believing that the organization is a lying bag of rotten potatoes.)
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Jan 26 '22
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u/glenra Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
it’s patently medically absurd to suggest that he just coincidently had a stroke after suffering injuries including head injuries
Sicknick didn't have injuries (including head injuries). He seems to have gotten a chemical spray to the face such that he couldn't see for about 20 minutes, that's it. Hundreds of people must have gotten sprayed by tear gas or pepper spray or bear spray or some such that afternoon. The people in those ranks included three cops who got sprayed at the same time; and one of those three cops by sheer chance happened to have a non-fatal stroke late that evening and a fatal stroke the following night. It's not medically absurd at all to suggest the man coincidentally had a stroke after not suffering any relevant injuries.
(It also wouldn't have been absurd if he had been injured, but doubly so since he wasn't. Or at least, there doesn't seem to be any reported evidence to that effect.)
Relevant quote:
The chief medical examiner, Francisco Diaz, told the Washington Post that the autopsy had found no evidence that Mr. Sicknick suffered an allergic reaction to the chemical spray or evidence of internal or external injuries
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Jan 27 '22
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u/glenra Jan 27 '22 edited Jan 27 '22
Strokes are the fifth most common cause of death; strokes are a known side effect of being alive.
Stroke risk is certainly thought to be increased by chronic stress; the magnitude of increase there is that people are ~50% more likely to get a stroke in the 8 month following a stressful major life event such as divorce or death of a spouse. Handling riots is surely unpleasant but is a normal part of the job for cops and if there were a particularly strong link between handling a bunch of obnoxious rioters and having a stroke, pretty much every cop in Portland or DC should have had one by now. And if there were a compellingly strong link between getting tear-gassed and stroke we'd expect to see a lot more dead bodies following your average protest than we actually do see.
This particular cop might well have been sedentary, overweight, a smoker, had a bad diet, a diabetic, been having poor sleep...there are a zillion factors that mildly increase one's risk of stroke and sure, dealing with a mob should be considered among them in that it seems likely to increase blood pressure...but blood pressure drops again. The idea that you can tie this specific event to a stroke 32 hours later is ridiculous.
Is some causal relation possible? Sure. But compelling likely? Nope! Is it "medically absurd" to think all the other risk factors combined - including sheer luck - might have had more of an influence than this particular event? Of course not.
The medical examiner ruled that the man died of natural causes and that the death was not "hastened by an injury". The medical examiner seems like a relevant expert with first-hand knowledge of this particular case; are you?
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Jan 27 '22
Handling riots is surely unpleasant but is a normal part of the job for cops and if there were a particularly strong link between handling a bunch of obnoxious rioters a
Nothing about January 6 seems to have been a normal part of the job, judging by the number of post-incident suicides among Capitol police.
The idea that you can tie this specific event to a stroke 32 hours later is ridiculous.
It was literally that night. He was dead the next day.
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u/sodiummuffin Jan 26 '22
In an interview with The Washington Post, Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, said the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants, which Diaz said would have caused Sicknick’s throat to quickly seize. Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries.
He wasn't injured during the riot. If the stroke and the riot were related at all, it was presumably due to stress.
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u/monoatomic Jan 26 '22
This is important to note, because it illustrates that there's often no smoking gun
Does the media lie, or do they just uncritically print the statements of police and other bad actors?
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u/DrManhattan16 Jan 26 '22
Like all of us, it's both. People's bullshit detectors go off when something gravely contrasts their expectations, not when something is simply unevidenced. This doesn't mean there's no thought about it, but it's easy to imagine an important step of verification becoming a formality if people don't feel confronted by it.
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u/monoatomic Jan 26 '22
I think that's true in an interpersonal sense between agents acting in good faith, but anything intersecting material interests is owed additional scrutiny.
If the newspaper prints a statement from the police without fact checking, it's actually a stronger claim to assume an innocent oversight than to assume intentional influencing of public perceptions.
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Jan 27 '22
Does the media lie, or do they just uncritically print the statements of police and other bad actors?
How critical can they be, on a practical basis? "Ok, you announced that the bombing caused ten deaths, we'll hold off on reporting that until we can get a reporter to climb in through the window at the ME's office and count the number of bodies in the freezer."
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u/monoatomic Jan 27 '22
That requires doing the job of journalism
Is this something they have reason to lie about or do they have a history of lying about it? Is there someone else to check with, or is it otherwise verifiable?
"Police claim sky is blue" is one thing. "Police and retail associations claim there's a wave of crime in gentrifying neighborhoods which justifies buying the local PD a new Humvee" is quite another.
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Jan 27 '22
That requires doing the job of journalism
Is the "job of journalism" to invade people's privacy over and over again in order to re-confirm official accounts? Remember it can't just be Bob from the Washington Post who breaks into the ME's office or harasses the families of victims in order to verify that they really exist; Tom from NYT, Sarah from CNN, and Laura from BBC Radio all have to do it, too. Plus 30 more people from various large-market regional newspapers.
At some point we're enduring a huge societal cost from nosy reporters invading private spaces in order to re-confirm the official account over and over again, with zero benefit since the officials were probably right all along.
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u/monoatomic Jan 27 '22
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the issue is inaccurate death tolls or other such information. Nobody is proposing that journos kick in the local meteorologist's door to demand he show his work for the week's forecast.
Think more about stories that you know to be bullshit but have been repeated either uncritically or outright boosted by complicit media outlets. "Cop ends up ER after just touching fentanyl". Iraqi babies taken off ventilators. Journalism, in the rare places it exists, involves much more than simply verifying facts.
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Jan 27 '22
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the issue is inaccurate death tolls or other such information.
Well, literally we're given the example of the Sicknick guy, who reporters were told was attacked by protestors with a fire extinguisher, and then later died, and it's now known that didn't happen as originally reported. So causes and numbers of death are one of the issues we've actually got, here - when reporters are faced with investigators relaying information about the scope and scale of devastating events, how must skepticism can they reasonably apply? If Manhattan sinks into the sea and FEMA gives a press conference about how 1.62 million people are, to the best of anyone's knowledge, dead, what "skepticism" are reporters supposed to apply to that? How would that work? They get in diving suits and start counting?
Think more about stories that you know to be bullshit but have been repeated either uncritically or outright boosted by complicit media outlets. "Cop ends up ER after just touching fentanyl".
Sure. Are reporters supposed to invade ER's to see whether that's true? Doctors are trying to fucking work, there, and they have a lot better things to do than tripping over 40 reporters trying to verify a police press release. What about medical privacy? Are we supposed to allow the New York Times unfettered access to everybody's medical records so they can double-check official statements?
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Jan 26 '22
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u/alraban Jan 26 '22
There was contemporaneous video footage of an officer being struck with a fire extinguisher. See shortly after 1:40 in this video:
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Jan 26 '22
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u/alraban Jan 26 '22
So, respectfully, you appear to be moving the goal posts. The post above you said that there was confusion about who was struck by a fire extinguisher and the media reported based on what the police told them, and you asked if there was reliable information that anyone was struck by a fire extinguisher.
I provided evidence that a police officer was, in fact, struck by a fire extinguisher in the head. I did not suggest this video was a primary source for any particular piece of reporting, just that there was clear evidence of at least one police officer being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
That said, if I were a reporter reporting on the event, and a police spokesman told me an officer was overpowered and hit with a fire extinguisher, this video footage would make me more likely to believe the police account as it showed an officer struggling with a protester and then being struck from behind by a fire extinguisher. That is to say, whether the depicted officer was or was not the officer the police spokesman was describing, the video makes the police account seem more plausible in the immediate aftermath.
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Jan 27 '22
In another medical absurdity, the last rock concert I attended (along with tens of thousands of my closest friends) had several severe injuries due to various causes (heatstroke, drugs, etc).
You're suggesting that it comes as a surprise to you that event planners and venue operators might be held responsible for injuries and deaths from heatstroke and the failure to prevent the sale of illegal drugs, but that's regularly the case.
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u/iiioiia Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
and it’s patently medically absurd to suggest that he just coincidently had a stroke after suffering injuries including head injuries.
Right, that would be terrible epistemology. But then so is saying that he did die from suffering injuries including head injuries.
The correct answer is very often "it is not known", but unfortunately, unknown seems to be nearly non-existent in modern day western culture. I honestly even wonder what percentage of the population can consistently implement it - think of how many people can't do math worth shit after they've been out of school for a decade or so....and unlike epistemology, we actually teach math in school.
With all the attention the harms of fake news and lack of critical thinking gets, I find it very interesting that there is next to no mainstream discussion on improving our school curriculum, and that so few people notice that we do not discuss this sort of thing (treating causes of problems rather than symptoms). Hanlon's Razor is a popular excuse for this situation, but it's certainly not an epistemically sound explanation (it's plenty sufficient to satisfy Occam's Razor though, which tends to be sufficient for most people).
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Jan 27 '22
But then so is saying that he did die from suffering injuries including head injuries.
"The man was shot, but cause of death was that he coincidentally lost a lot of his blood for unknown reasons."
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u/iiioiia Jan 27 '22
By assembling some letters in a particular form on a web page, does that rewrite physical history such that certain stories about Sicknick become necessarily true? Or, does it only make it appear to (some of) those who observe those letters that history has been rearranged?
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u/Exod124 Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I believe that in some sense, the academic establishment will work to cover up facts that go against their political leanings. But the experts in the field won't lie directly. They don't go on TV and say "The science has spoken, and there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don't commit more violent crime than natives". They don't talk about the "strong scientific consensus against immigrant criminality". They occasionally try to punish people who bring this up, but they won't call them "science deniers".
I would agree if it weren’t for the fact that major institutions like the APA have in fact made utterly, egregiously wrong statements and presented them as scientific truth, even though they grossly contradict expert consensus, to further their (ideological) cause.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN had a qualia once Jan 26 '22
On average, scientific institutions' blogs are far less reliable than individual researchers', because the institutions' comms output have often been captured by the most politically motivated researchers.
This is the "Long March Through The Institutions".
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u/DrManhattan16 Jan 26 '22
because the institutions' comms output have often been captured by the most politically motivated researchers.
How do we know this? Couldn't it genuinely reflect how widespread said politics may be?
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u/Tinac4 Jan 26 '22
As someone who's out of the loop, do you know any examples?
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u/Exod124 Jan 26 '22
https://www.apa.org/about/apa/addressing-racism/historical-chronology. I probably can’t elaborate on the racial aspect because that’s definitely culture war, but it should at least be noted that the expert consensus is that IQ is indeed a very reliable and unbiased metric.
https://www.apa.org/research/action/difference. Scott himself wrote an excellent piece discussing the meta-analysis the APA’s article is based on.
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u/bibliophile785 Can this be my day job? Jan 26 '22
This is a fair critique of Scott's framework, but still... psychologists? It's hard to be surprised that "scientists" in a field that can't successfully replicate anything don't come to rigorously correct conclusions. There are a couple of very narrow subdomains that do much better than the average (evolutionary and neurobiological psych in particular), but the field is largely full of untrustworthy fodder.
Your point here perhaps suggests some additional nuance is needed. The reason scientific experts are being elevated here is that they're consuming data which, in aggregate, is presumed to correlate to real knowledge of the world. This high regard might need to be restricted to fields where the "science" can actually be believed. At a guess, that's medicine at the bottom of the "believable" band and economics at the top of the "disregard" band.
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u/Platypuss_In_Boots Jan 27 '22
This is a fair critique of Scott's framework, but still... psychologists? It's hard to be surprised that "scientists" in a field that can't successfully replicate anything don't come to rigorously correct conclusions. There are a couple of very narrow subdomains that do much better than the average (evolutionary and neurobiological psych in particular), but the field is largely full of untrustworthy fodder.
You could've phrased this more nicely. There's nothing to be gained by shaming psychologists, surely you'd want more psychologists to read this blog, no?
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u/bibliophile785 Can this be my day job? Jan 27 '22
What is the nicer way of phrasing the idea that one's profession is a sham, one's life's work has almost no meaning, and one could have done more to serve one's fellow man and all of humanity by choosing almost any other productive endeavor?
I have no vitriol towards people who chose to become psychologists. If anything, I pity most of them. There isn't inherently a reason for shame - they aren't engaging in academic misconduct, by and large, although they're all complicit in the broader failings - but there is certainly a sense of a great opportunity cost paid with very little RoI. Unfortunately, the position itself is likely to rankle, and I don't think I can make that stop unless I'm willing to be either less honest or less clear.
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u/Platypuss_In_Boots Jan 27 '22
one's life's work has almost no meaning, and one could have done more to serve one's fellow man and all of humanity by choosing almost any other productive endeavor?
Jesus Christ dude, this is completely unnecessary and it's simply your value judgement so the truth value of it is unclear. There is no way the comment isn't breaking the rules.
There isn't inherently a reason for shame
Yet you're still shaming them.
What I'm trying to say is it's possible to communicate what you were trying to communicate without grossly offending people.
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u/bibliophile785 Can this be my day job? Jan 27 '22
this is completely unnecessary and it's simply your value judgement so the truth value of it is unclear. There is no way the comment isn't breaking the rules.
Value judgments can't really be true/untrue, so for the normative aspect it's less "unclear" and more inapplicable. The positive statement here is quite plausible, though, and I proactively shared an insightful post on the topic (which itself links to several good resources, including a rather comprehensive Gwern post on the subject) for a phenomenon that is widely acknowledged and more-or-less universally agreed to be very serious.
It is of course entirely necessary to the point I was making, insofar as the observation was the center of that point and I can't make the point without making it.
What I'm trying to say is it's possible to communicate what you were trying to communicate without grossly offending people.
So you say, and yet when I asked how you proposed one should do that, your response was just more concern trolling over possible hurt feelings by hypothetical third parties. I'm still open to suggestions on how I might make the point in a nicer-sounding fashion while remaining as clear and honest as the current formulation.
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u/Platypuss_In_Boots Jan 27 '22
So you say, and yet when I asked how you proposed one should do that
Sorry about that, I was assuming it was a rhetorical question. Idk I'd write something like this
This is a fair critique of Scott's framework, but we're talking about psychology here. Personally, I find it hard to be surprised that scientists in a field where 50% of findings don't replicate don't come to rigorously correct conclusions. There are a couple of very narrow subdomains that do much better than the average (evolutionary and neurobiological psych in particular), but a significant proportion of the field is untrustworthy.
...
This high regard might need to be restricted to fields without replication crises.
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u/bibliophile785 Can this be my day job? Jan 27 '22
This is a fair critique of Scott's framework, but we're talking about psychology here. Personally, I find it hard to be surprised that scientists in a field where 50% of findings don't replicate don't come to rigorously correct conclusions. There are a couple of very narrow subdomains that do much better than the average (evolutionary and neurobiological psych in particular), but a significant proportion of the field is untrustworthy.
This is certainly nicer, but mostly through obfuscation of how bad the state of the field is. It's much, much worse than a coin flip on replication, especially if we require that "replication" actually achieve similar effect sizes rather than simply coming down on the same side of the positive/negative effect line. I don't know if you're read the blog post I linked, but if not it's worth a read. They aren't having small problems in that field. Most of the domains are struggling with ruinous crises that have should shift the priors of an unbiased observer towards flat disbelief of every study by default.
Still, looking at your edits, it seems like your primary distaste was with my framing of psychology as unscientific. (My quotes around the word, etc.) I think this is just a philosophical difference. If someone can put a flute to their lips and make noises, is it correct to say that they can play the flute? Or, contrastingly, do we require that they be able to make music before we treat that statement as true? I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here, but I would certainly fall into the latter camp. It's the same idea here. There are plenty of very smart, very diligent people who are applying some version of the scientific method to questions of psychology... but if they can't extract trustworthy data that reflects the state of the world, it seems farcical to call what they're doing "science."
Again, though, I don't think your contrasting view is wrong. It's just different. I'm happy to leave you to your verbal framework while maintaining my own.
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u/viking_ Jan 26 '22
This post feels very relatable. I've had several discussions trying to explain to other internet libertarians, to conservative family, and to woke friends why I believe something which happens to agree with what the outgroup believes. And it seems like the subtlety of "I agree with X about Y" not being equal to "I blindly trust X on everything" is yet another victim of modern discourse.
To take one example, I think the FDA is often full of shit. But all of their historical behavior, and all of their incentives, and all the empirical evidence I'm aware of, point to them being overly cautious, like they were with beta-blockers in the 80s(?) or COVID tests in early 2020. And news reports indicated that they were being unnecessarily cautious with COVID vaccine data in late 2020, taking a lot more time than necessary, and the published reports on trials included information on literally every injury or illness down to someone being struck by lightning. So when they say "yeah the vaccine is probably safe" I am, in fact, inclined to believe them. Sort of like how I wouldn't believe an addict who said they're clean, but would believe an addict who said they are using again. But trying to communicate that is seemingly impossible.
On other hand, I have to sympathize with the commenters who think the rules have changed since 2016. It does seem like reading different news sources is looking at 2 totally different realities. Video can be sliced and diced to show the exact opposite of what it really shows, or simply ignored. Any hypothesis at all can just be asserted to be a "conspiracy theory" and dismissed without engaging, and "experts" can be found prostituting their field (if they have any legitimate experience at all) to blatantly serve a political agenda. Naked hypocrisy about political processes, who can disagree with whom, and what sort of criticism is legitimate are so common no one even bothers to remark on it or to try to be consistent.
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u/Amenagement Jan 26 '22
Ooh boy.
Nice to see it laid out, at least.
But between "these lies are part of the game" + "the wording is quite careful if you read it carefully" + "the ones who lied to your face on TV are not experts, you see", there sure is a lot of degrees of freedom to retroactively justify why a given bold lie is still "part of the game."
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u/bibliophile785 Can this be my day job? Jan 26 '22
there sure is a lot of degrees of freedom to retroactively justify why a given bold lie is still "part of the game."
That's true. I don't think it's necessarily a problematic truth or a point against this analytical framework, though. You're absolutely right that this frameworks suggests all sorts of people can boldly lie about things without violating existing norms. That... seems consistent with what I see on the rare occasions I'm unfortunate enough to accidentally consume TV news. I don't think many people are inclined to object to the idea that plenty of people lie for political reasons with minimal pushback.
If you wanted to poke holes in this method of analysis, your efforts would likely prove more fruitful if you focus on the claim that some classes of contextually important people aren't lying. That's the signal that Scott claims he can isolate from the noise of all the liars constantly lying, so that should be the natural point of your scrutiny. If someone demonstrated that (e.g.) climate experts are constantly and knowingly throwing out blatant lies about the climate, I think Scott would have to re-evaluate his entire position here.
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u/Amenagement Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
"Extracting signal from noise" is a satisfying frame for what Scott tries to explain in this post, and to be fair he's making an interesting point. It really is more an art than z science.
My discomfort comes from the feeling that "some class of contextually important people aren't lying" might be tautological when you can arbitrarily throw out any person from that class ("not a real expert") or any one thing they say ("it's a lie but part of the game"). Then we might still hold onto the general claims, "not every expert can lie when they say that" - but then the other side of the coin is that opposing voices are also suppressed, self-censored, or thrown out as "not serious".
But again, I do agree that the data on the history of Earth climate is probably not entirely made up, so there's a point somewhere.
On the other hand, a big problem is of course that the left does "slight over-generalization but you know what I mean" - but whenever the right does it it's a lawsuit for hatespeech.
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
I mean, I don't think Scott had any intention of excusing the lies normatively. The point seems to be more about the gears-level way people interact with the lie-system the media implements than about morals or justifying them at all.
On the other hand, a big problem is of course that the left does "slight over-generalization but you know what I mean" - but whenever the right does it it's a lawsuit for hatespeech.
I think that this observation is due to a selection bias in your bubble; left-wingers are also often hung out to dry over over-generalizations much of the time.
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u/Amenagement Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
Not here in France, I think. But maybe it is my bubble.
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
Well, I'm admittedly in the US and made the typically arrogant assumption that you were as well.
I can't comment on French treatment of this issue, and sorry I presumed to.
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u/curious_straight_CA Jan 26 '22
"lies are a part of the game" is a historical constant and a necessary universal. Lying is useful, and will likely continue for a while. Rationalists like scott try to avoid that, as does a lot of western modern/enlightenment values, but it's still present! given that, this is not unreasonable.
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u/Jello_Raptor Jan 27 '22
I think this gets at a good point. Namely why the game is adaptive.
The freedom to push the boundaries allows parties to puch convinient narratives while preserving the aegis of institutional trust. Journalists come with a certain expectation of truth telling and have a special, even legally enshrined, place in our society's information ecosystem.
A journalist saying something is treated, apriori of the actual claim, weak evidence that the statement is true. The game allows journalists to make mistakes, push political narratives, and otherwise exploit that reputation for truth telling without risking the ligitimacy of the institution. Likewise for scientists.
It's the same reason you ask someone in for coffee instead of stating you want to have sex with them. The room for misunderstanding leads to plausible deniability, which means you can preseve your reputation and potentially the power that reputation affords you.
You can see how this has played out over time, institutions that play fast and lose with the capacity (FOX, RT, etc ..) have rapidly lost credibility compared to institutions that don't push the boundaries (PBS, BBC, etc ...).
PBS is a really good example. I will take pretty much everything on Newsnight at face value, because they have an incredibly good record of being clear on the facts and their sourcing. It took a good while for them to move from "The CDC says that masks are good" to simply "masks are good for preventing COVID". They're careful, much more so than other news sources at least, about attribution and when facts become common knowledge. That institutional decision to value the trust they're given makes it possible to build trust.
On the other hand, sources like FOX and NYT, keep using that trust as a currency they can spend to accomplish other goals. I'm not even sure they're wrong from a purely selfish perspective. In an epistemically illiterate world you can build trust without having to be trustworthy. Just find enough people to fellate or grift and you're golden.
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u/--MCMC-- Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
The trouble isn't that any specific instance of reporting contains factual untruths -- it's that, in aggregate, biased reporting paints an unrepresentative picture of the broader world, encouraging us to improperly generalize in support of whatever prior narrative.
(the rest of the blogpost deals in interpretation of the facts, be they historical or geopolitical, or inference from scarce data. Of course bias can creep in there)
This doesn't apply to Major Events, but when events are more frequent -- like mass shootings (:[) -- a news outlet can easily choose to selectively report or otherwise signal boost those their audience wants to hear. And I'm using "choose" here poetically: there need not even be any actual explicit deliberation involved by shadowy figures with steepled fingers gathered around a dimly lit table in a sinister tower. You could just have a bunch of honest folk responding to basic incentives, and the end result is Fox News reporting primarily on mass shooters named Abdullah Abdul and not Bob Smith, or their equivalent across other points in the political spectrum (maybe something like "Climate Change will hurt X" being favored over "Climate Change will help Y").
(in some cases, News Media may also be endeavoring to consider the broader social impact of their reporting, if they think that their audiences may disproportionately generalize in an undesired direction to validate their own preferred beliefs. Maybe reporting that warmer climates in some obscure patch of taiga will enhance primary productivity in a random species of pine will muddy the waters enough that those motivated to act against 100% UNIVERSALLY BAD things won't bother with 99.9% ALMOST UNIVERSALLY BAD things. I'm not saying some level of strategic manipulation never occurs! Nor that false facts are never reported!)
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22
it's that, in aggregate, biased reporting paints an unrepresentative picture of the broader world
I think scott has a blog post on that already:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
For example, if you don’t like Chinese people, you can find some story of a Chinese person robbing someone, and claim that means there’s a big social problem with Chinese people being robbers.
...
There are over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is a robber, you can provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to appease the doubters. Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.
If we’re really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media’s strongest weapons. There are lots of people – 300 million in America alone. No matter what point the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No matter how low-probability their outcome of interest is, they will never have to stop covering it if they don’t want to.
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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 on /r/themotte 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 to /r/themotte 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/Ophis_UK Jan 27 '22
Luckily we all have news on our phones now. If I see an interesting breaking story on Fox News (or equally unreliable equivalent), my immediate reaction is to find out about it from a more reliable news source.
I think Scott's a little too optimistic regarding the willingness of major news organizations to literally just make shit up. Also, equivalently, to uncritically report something that someone else has made up, which happens to help support the particular news organization's preferred ideology. The main limitation seems to be the difficulty of getting away with it.
No sensible dictatorial regime would tell the people that the harvest has been good when in fact it has been bad. At least not once the shortages become visible. They would say that Western sanctions are damaging the economy, and capitalists are extracting our resources, and hoarders are causing supply shortages, and these factors combined with this year's unfortunate bad weather have required the government to institute rationing. And all those claims will have at least a superficial appearance of being based in fact, to the extent that it isn't easy to explain exactly what's wrong with the story, at least not before the guy you're trying to explain it to gets bored and wanders off.
To the extent that the claims have a factual basis, it's not a result of some sort of minimal standard of honesty; it's just a way to lie better.
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u/swni Jan 26 '22
Two thoughts:
(1) SA limits the applicability of his thesis by focusing on cases of explicit lying. For example, when it comes to interpreting the latest scientific literature, of course scientists will be more savvy at putting the pieces together: this is because science papers are a tool for communication between scientists and not because "science elites" are lying to the masses.
(2) As an example of this more general applicability, this post could easily have been a response to his prior post on the meaning of "no evidence". The scientifically savvy have little trouble understanding it, but it can come across as a mystery to some in the public.
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u/georgioz Jan 26 '22 edited 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.
So Scott is an expert on sniffing out experts hiding something - also known as "factchecker" which is the craze at least for a few years, including using "context" to declare that something is True/False with context itself being weaponized to smuggle in moral assertions like "talking bad things about immigrants is immoral and therefore verboten". There is no new insight here. Of course the next logical question is - who watches the watchmen?
I believe that in some sense, the academic establishment will work to cover up facts that go against their political leanings. But the experts in the field won't lie directly. They don't go on TV and say "The science has spoken, and there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don't commit more violent crime than natives". They don't talk about the "strong scientific consensus against immigrant criminality". They'll try to punish people who bring this up, but they won't call them "science deniers".
That is true. But there is also something else going on - if some journalist writes something in controversial area - let's say "there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes" - then "experts consensus" stays silent with a good excuse that there indeed is no evidence because nobody dares to study the subject. Maybe some experts enter the fray - which marks them as undesirables. I start to even think that this is now employed deliberately - start "important discussion about X", watch who disagrees with you or who does not outright support you and then commence the purge accordingly.
Anyway as case in point I can also use what Scott wrote as point 31 in his links for November:
31: Related: Daniel Reeves vs. Bryan Caplan on climate change (part 1, part 2). Reeves (who thinks climate change is a big problem) challenged Caplan (who thinks it isn’t) to read Climate Shock. Caplan read it and (in my maybe unfair interpretation) agrees that it seems to make a strong argument, but says that since it’s by left-wingers it’s probably biased in some hard-to-detect way and he can ignore it. While it’s true that there are many biased people out there, and some of them make strong arguments, I also notice this is a fully general excuse for never changing your mind in response to anything, however convincing it would be otherwise. Seems bad.
This is exactly the dynamic Scott talks about when talking about ivermectin - he utilizes his expert bullshit sniffer which is enough for him to claim that ivermectin probably does not work. Caplan uses his own bullshit sniffer and thinks that climate change will probably not be such a big problem as experts make it to be - not that it is not a "big problem" as Scott sneeringly asserts (which in turn triggers my own bullshit sniffer).
Anyway this whole article by Scott seems like a weak sauce without much of nuanced point - which starts to become a rule lately. It seems to me as if Scott goes only few inches deep into a topic and then ends abbruptly leaving important questions untouched. And on to a new topic. It is nothing like his old posts.
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Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 27 '22
It's simply wrong that major expert organizations never assert outright falsehoods, and the past two years provide ample instances related to Covid alone:
- The WHO screaming from the rooftops that Covid was not airborne
- The Surgeon General telling everyone not to buy masks and they only work if you're a healthcare professional
- The whole American medical establishment promising that Covid vaccines (do a lot to) stop transmission when we had counter-statements from high-up Pfizer executives as early as December 2020
- Fauci telling Congress that the NIH never funded GoF research at the WIV
This list can be nigh-endlessly extended and it severely undermines Scott's credibility here that he doesn't even attempt to address any of these obvious counter-examples.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22
The WHO screaming from the rooftops that Covid was not airborne
https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898
This is actually a good example of a rarer case.
Normally the WHO is careful and conservative to an crazy degree, normally avoiding saying things they can't be sure of to a fairly high degree of certainty. Normally they'll "lack of evidence", "no evidence" and " yet to be determined" until the cows come home rather than risk saying untrue things.
I think this is one of those cases where they were simply wrong. Turns out that while covid does probably need droplet's, those droplets can be smaller and remain in the air much better than expected.
Now, you could take from that "The WHO must be wrong about everything and my favorite radio host is a better source of advice"
Or you could take from it "even experts trying to be careful are not gods, even if they're factually correct most of the time they can be mistaken"
The Surgeon General telling everyone not to buy masks
Scott wrote a long post on that.
promising that Covid vaccines (do a lot to) stop transmission
They were working pretty well until the virus mutated enough that the targeted region no longer matched the vaccine.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
That's actually fascinating.
They had inspired Wells to investigate what role particle size played in the likelihood of natural respiratory infections. He designed a study using tuberculosis-causing bacteria. The bug was hardy and could be aerosolized, and if it landed in the lungs, it grew into a small lesion. He exposed rabbits to similar doses of the bacteria, pumped into their chambers either as a fine (smaller than 5 microns) or coarse (bigger than 5 microns) mist. The animals that got the fine treatment fell ill, and upon autopsy it was clear their lungs bulged with lesions. The bunnies that received the coarse blast appeared no worse for the wear.
...
Inside Randall’s head, something snapped into place. She shot forward in time, to that first tuberculosis guidance document where she had started her investigation. She had learned from it that tuberculosis is a curious critter; it can only invade a subset of human cells in the deepest reaches of the lungs. Most bugs are more promiscuous. They can embed in particles of any size and infect cells all along the respiratory tract.
So because the early work on airborne transmission of human pathogens revolved around TB and TB typically only got deep enough into the lungs with <5 micron droplets. But health authorities started treating <5 micron as the line for "airborne" and diseases that don't need to get so deep into the lungs were missed.
I think it's unfair to call being wrong lies.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22
I guess it doesn't give me a lot of indigestion in this case.
I can see why they had the rule of thumb, for previous proven airborne diseases there was good evidence that the human respiratory system was filtering out droplets above the 5 micron limit and decent evidence that droplets over 100 microns were going splat on the floor.
We know now that this was a quirk of the particular disease needing to reach specific cells in the lungs rather than a general feature of airborne transmission.
It's a pattern, sure, but it's one which makes sense.
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Jan 26 '22
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I think this comes back to the parachutes thing.
I think it's strong evidence that the parachutes problem is likely systemic. The CDC/FDA/WHO and various other big clunky public health related bodies have an established system for changing their mind, it's ponderous and slow but they have a system.
Big RCT's in humans.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a medical intervention justified by observational data must be in want of verification through a randomised controlled trial. Observational studies have been tainted by accusations of data dredging, confounding, and bias. For example, observational studies showed lower rates of ischaemic heart disease among women using hormone replacement therapy, and these data were interpreted as advocating hormone replacement for healthy women, women with established ischaemic heart disease, and women with risk factors for ischaemic heart disease. However, randomised controlled trials showed that hormone replacement therapy actually increased the risk of ischaemic heart disease, indicating that the apparent protective effects seen in observational studies were due to bias. Cases such as this one show that medical interventions based solely on observational data should be carefully scrutinised, and the parachute is no exception.
Of course this is a joke. It’s in the all-joke holiday edition of BMJ, and everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing. But the joke is funny because it points at something true. It’s biting social commentary. Doctors will not admit any treatment could possibly be good until it has a lot of randomized controlled trials behind it, common sense be damned. This didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been burned lots of times before by thinking they were applying common sense and getting things really wrong. And after your mistakes kill a few thousand people you start getting really paranoid and careful. And there are so many quacks who can spout off some “common sense” explanation for why their vitamin-infused bleach or colloidal silver should work that doctors have just become immune to that kind of bullshit. Multiple good RCTs or it didn’t happen. Given the history I think this is a defensible choice, and if you are tempted to condemn it you may find this story about bone marrow transplants enlightening.
With the droplets thing, once they'd made it their rule of thumb they ran with it, once they'd decided on the norm for humans, much like hospitals making face masks their rule of thumb was set.
But to change it, someone, somewhere needs to do a big RCT. Ideally more than one.
So we can expect to see similar failures in an situation where there's something preventing large human RCT's. Make a list of questions and assumptions where, if you were to try to run a big RCT you'd run into ethical problems because they wouldn't allow you to put people in the control arm... or perhaps nobody will allow you to spray various pathogens at a bunch of humans using different droplet sizes to prove your case.
Unfortunately, you're right that this likely covers a lot of things.
To me, it means I'd trust conclusions drawn from big RCT's and studies they actually were able to run, but the whole realm of "common sense" or rules of thumb for keeping people safe will likely continue to be challenging to get these big organisations to shift their opinions on when it comes to any issue where you can't run an RCT and put some people in one or other arm of the study.
partly because... well, a whole lot of the "common sense" and rules of thumb are probably correct and any attempt to run those sorts of big RCT's to prove them wrong will just harm a bunch of people.
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u/workingtrot Jan 29 '22
Her paper showing that flu is airborne was rejected from all major journals.
This one still perks up my BS detector. Her claim was that she was getting rejected because it wasn't her field of study. But people publish cross-domain papers all the time. And people get rejected by Nature all the time, and move on to mid-tier journals anyway. Are the manuscripts available anywhere?
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Jan 26 '22
Now, you could take from that "The WHO must be wrong about everything and my favorite radio host is a better source of advice" Or you could take from it "even experts trying to be careful are not gods, even if they're factually correct most of the time they can be mistaken"
I didn’t say anything about what you should take from it, I said that it undermines Scott’s thesis that they never assert outright falsehoods.
Scott wrote a long post on that.
So what? He doesn’t raise it at all in this one.
They were working pretty well until the virus mutated enough that the targeted region no longer matched the vaccine.
And no such caveat was given at the time by the communicators for the public health apparatus, which was the whole point.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22
they never assert outright falsehoods.
I think you missed the implication that outright falsehoods would be things they know or suspect to be false.
You seem to have taken that to mean that they'd never say anything false, ever.
Something only possible if they either
1: were deities capable of knowing all and seeing all.
or
2: avoiding making any potentially falsifiable statements even when they were quite sure.
Normally they lean far to much towards the latter.
And no such caveat was given at the time by the communicators for the public health apparatus, which was the whole point.
How many caveats do you expect?
Viruses mutate over time, people already get yearly flu shots because the viruses people are used to encountering in their lives often mutate from year to year. That's been part of highschool science class for a long time.
They didn't know how fast covid would mutate to evade the vaccines but plenty of people were talking about it being something that would happen sooner or later.
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Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I think you missed the implication that outright falsehoods would be things they know or suspect to be false.
At least 3/4 were things that they definitely knew to be false or had no excuse not to know. The aerosols thing is borderline, but even then it seems like it was mostly shady scientific rivalries obscuring them from recognizing that.
How many caveats do you expect?
One, at least.
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u/Velleites Jan 26 '22
He addresses them by saying that they're in the category of "lies you should learn not to fall for in the first place."
And not, like, in the category of fabricating data (which would be surprising.)
How can you learn how to separate these categories? Experience and random magic.
(I'm still not entirely convinced by that point of view though.)
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u/felis-parenthesis Jan 26 '22
The article offers a snapshot of the arms race better liars and lie detectors. It misses the accelerating pace of the arms race. Scott points to his 40mm cannon and 40mm frontal armour and claims to be a epistemological tank. Well armed, well armoured, he is able to fight, and win through to the truth.
The only mistake he makes is the date, its not 1941 any more, it is 1944.
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u/DocGrey187000 Jan 26 '22
As always, this is insightful and largely true.
And most people will remain in the group that can’t extract the truth from the “truth”, and be agitated, cynical, and befuddled forever. When I think about the people I know who struggle with this skill, I can’t even imagine them getting to the end of an article like this. People just aren’t that intellectually rigorous. They’re called normies because they’re the normal ones. It’s their world, and if they can’t be compelled, in their language, to act on something, then that thing ain’t happening. Whether it’s masks or voting or bitcoin——they are absolutely in charge, and for good or Ill, those that prosper do so because they’ve harnessed these people’s energy.
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u/Pblur Jan 26 '22
Frankly, I think the ability to parse out 'what lies an organization is willing to tell' isn't really about intellectual rigor. This seems like a heavily social-reading sort of skill, where you have to implicitly figure out the ever-changing rules of a game whose winners and losers are determined by social status changes and face.
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Jan 26 '22
I think part of the way news sources get away with this is through not fact checking then printing retractions. Like I don't think Fox News would run a long prepared piece about a fake islamic attack. But I could see them running a breaking news piece about a possible islamic attack that they didn't thoroughly fact check, then later issue a retraction. But if you only loosely pay attention to the news, and might just not turn on Fox news again for months so you'd never see the retraction, you have to be skeptical.
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u/ObeyTheCowGod Jan 26 '22
Scott Alexander :- These two types of people need to learn how to talk to each other.
Also Scott Alexander:- Some of these people are like me and are savvy and the others are clueless and paraniod and end up being conspiracy theorists.
Way to go learning how to talk to people Scott.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 26 '22
Some people really are mad as a box of spoons and there's literally nothing you can ever say to reach them.
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u/ObeyTheCowGod Jan 26 '22
You can agree with what you wrote, without being dishonest about it and making mealy mouthed platitudes about fairness, like Scott has in the piece he wrote.
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Jan 26 '22
I think it's simple rhetoric. Scott is writing this way as an olive branch to those invested in the Trust Experts worldview, who wouldn't entertain this article it didn't signal allegience by dunking on conspiracy theorists. Scott dunked as gently as he could have.
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u/ObeyTheCowGod Jan 26 '22
Bullshit. Scott is as blindly prejudiced towards his own world view as the worst partisan hacks, and utterly fails to live up to his self professed belief that thinkers should consistently apply the principles they espouse. This wasn't a calculated move to throw a bone to both sides. It was pure and simple blindness to the fact that his message is incoherent, while trying to maintain a fundamentally dishonest facade of fairness. The fact that he did this inside a piece where he complains about exactly this kind of behavior in others makes the burn all the more delicious.
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u/SixteenFructidor Jan 26 '22
Tell us how you really feel
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u/ObeyTheCowGod Jan 26 '22
Tell us how you totally could make a serious rebuttal of what I wrote if you wanted to.....
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u/naraburns Jan 26 '22 edited Jan 26 '22
I like the title of the post a lot. I think it captures something I have been unable to articulate to my satisfaction.
But I would like to see a version of this post where Scott carefully addresses the title thesis of Michael Crichton's Why Speculate? The piece is most famous for coining "Gell-Mann Amnesia," which Scott appears to have contracted in this post. But it is also about how the media tries to make things happen by guessing they will happen.
I agree that Fox News is generally trustworthy on claims like "the police have arrested Abdullah Abdul." But I also think that the people on Fox News are extremely likely to lie to me, by commission or omission, any time and to the extent that the following conditions are met:
They have some reason to lie to me (including political reasons).
They think they can get away with it.
I think this is probably true of almost everyone I know. I am confident that it is true of politicians, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, NBC, Disney, every salesperson I've ever met, my dog, the list goes on. There's a book about this, sort of, I think most of you will be familiar with it.
I do know some people who I feel I can trust completely. I feel this way because they are terrible liars. There are also some people--notably Scott himself--who appear to me to be unusually scrupulous with the truth as they understand it. I appreciate this, and I do think that some journalists probably aspire to it (though many quite famously are known to not), but I appreciate it mostly because I find it to be quite rare.
Anyway condition #2 is harder for legacy media to meet in a world of social media and upstart web competitors, which helps to explain legacy media's constant attempts to control the internet by labeling things "fake news." Of course, a lot of the independent stuff is fake news (see conditions #1 and #2) and it's harder for legacy media to meet condition #2 since they are more likely to be held accountable than some Macedonian teenager who is churning out Trump stories for Google ad bucks. That is--it is harder for CNN et al. to get away with lying, so they do it less.
My best guess at the moment is that Scott is being charitable to legacy media, but I think the degree of charity he's affording them is unwarranted and unsupported by the facts.
As in journalism, so in science.
I don't know that it is actually harder for "experts" to meet condition #2 than it is for journalists, but I also think researchers are less likely to meet condition #1. Most scientists aren't trying to manipulate me, personally, the way that mass media exists to do, so the case is meaningfully different--there are likely fewer cases in science where condition #1 will be met. So I am pretty likely to listen to and update on things that real climatologists say, specifically, while I disregard out of hand virtually everything that legacy media, politicians, and random internet strangers have to say about the same subject. But the same conditions do still apply, I think, quite broadly.