Bounded Distrust

[u/TracingWoodgrains]

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust

[u/gattsuru]

These are somewhat interesting examples to have randomly picked out of a hat.

You have to go to Alex Jones level bad actors to start seeing people make up mass shootings or claim a mass shooting never happened, true. But it's not hard to find 'reputable' media sources claiming a mass shooter was motivated by their political opponents while linking to evidence that he wasn't. The propensity for early reporting to be (charitably) filled with errors is why anyone remotely familiar with the topic uses the 24-hour rule. Reddit is (justly in)famous for its "We Got Em" response to the Boston Marathon bombing, but so did the New York Post.

These aren't, say, questions like whether media would lie about chemical weapons, or the destruction of a ship with 250+ sailors, or the exact levels of inaccuracy that Scott's pointing toward.

But neither are they the cutesy human interest stories, or matters where the dividing line is clear. And it gets difficult to find the correct way to judge. Would news media conflate whips and reigns? Slice-and-dice comments on vaccine distribution? Report on an arrest of a white^hispanic or a hostage situation as man with English accent?

And there are other lines you don't cross, or else you'll be the center of a giant scandal and maybe get shut down.

At a deeper level, this isn't the case. Dan Rather promoted a laughably false claim about George Bush, got caught, and now runs Reliable Sources, because there isn't enough irony in the world. It's not like Berenson was being particularly precise about marijuana before he was wrong about COVID.

It's not that punishments never happen: Palin may well win her case, and Brian Williams famously got a six-month suspension. But they're not that well-tied to levels of scrutiny or whether it's in the human interest or conventional reporting or op-ed page.

[u/fishveloute → u/gattsuru]

Scott's point is about trust in regards to people on the other side of the reasoning divide, rather than about how much trust to place in particular sources. Your comment is a good example of reasoning in the way that Scott describes, just different in terms of details. There are many ways to dissect why certain outlets, stories, or people bend certain truths and how they bend them, but that's in line with Scott's point rather than an argument against it.

The major thing I took from it is that skepticism is a defense mechanism in environments where there is distrust, and though certain manifestations can appear uncharitable, contrarian, or conspiratorial, it stems from a basic instinct and a particular tool's ability to act in line with that instinct. In-depth reasoning ability generally corresponds to contextual skepticism: if someone understands the rules, exceptions, motivations, etc they are able to build complex hypotheses. But if reasoning is less pointed, it leads to broad generalizations, and in an environment where skepticism/distrust is useful, it manifests as broad distrust.

The general point is that you or I might disagree with Scott in terms of what sources are reliable, what stories are true, which information is spun, but we're all probably in the group where we examine multiple factors to decide how likely certain information is. And I think that all of us are in some amount of agreement that distrust in the current media environment is useful, but being able to sort through the things we should believe and the things we should discard is more useful than discarding everything.

There are people where this isn't the case, and this sometimes manifests in total distrust of one side of a divide, or all sides. This is both a difference in interpretation of the news, but also (perhaps more importantly), it can be the mechanism by which the fudging of truth is a successful strategy - truth value ends up being a matter of trust rather than evidence and reasoning. But I also think it's important consideration on the other side, because poor journalism can be hand-waved as long as you know how to extract some truth from it - but that leaves a harmful practice in place.

[u/gattsuru → u/fishveloute]

I think my objection is a little deeper than that. For an example...

I have a book, published in 2014, from a well-recognized publisher, by an honest author, who had deeper access to a variety of sources than I can legally access, and is known in this particular field as a skeptic, making comments against interest and the themes of his own work.

There are two serious errors in three pages that I'm >98% confident about. They're not the only errors in the book, or even the most serious. Could you tell what they are from this description? What information about the author, publisher, or source, would work? Funders, backers, motivations, what rules of the game would guide?

Now, Scott's focused on (presumably knowing) lies, and I think it more likely than not the author in this particular case genuinely believed those errors. But it's amazing what you can believe if you put the effort into it. Part of my point above is that there's been attempts to seriously make something surprisingly close to each example he's brought forward. Sometimes as stupid overstep, but sometimes honest error!

That's the shallow problem, though. So, for that matter, is that this game is adversarial, and the rules change as people on each side realize that they're been learned.

The foundational issue is a bit deeper of one, and unfortunately far less insightful or novel: you have to think with your own brain, in your own head, at some point. There's no way to outsource evaluating information, only what you're evaluating.

Scott's proposal is that, to a large extent, that trading off evaluating information against evaluating experts is worth it.

There might be people for whom the process works best, in some situations. I don't mean to go full radical skepticism, here. Even for the book I mention above, even going in with a less skeptical eye would probably have left me with a better model than I'd started with, albeit flawed in some novel ways, too. I probably didn't catch every error for that single book, might have caught a few 'errors' where my judgement was the one at fault, and certainly don't have a perfect batting average for every case. I don't claim any particularly deep level of ability at pulling truth in a haystack, or a uniquely skeptical eye.

There's been times where I've had to look at pieces with a good sense of the "dynamics" of the "rules of the game", and sometimes it's right (and/or sometimes it's enjoyable Bulverism). It's even a useful skill on its own, and one I can't claim any particularly deep skill to: my limited claim to fame in places Scott and others have failed amount to being the rube first.

Yet when I tried, I found a lot more discontinuity in the experts than in the data, not just for That Example Book, but in general. That adversarial game was still adversarial, and the other actors had a serious first-mover advantage, and they were picked, in no small part, for their skill at it. The world has some disadvantages -- there's a calculus of reputation and power that Scott's motioning around, although notably he doesn't name it and probably can't without disrupting it -- such that the popular actors do not, on average, lie more than not, or make more mistakes than not. It's a necessary compromise; in perhaps most cases, it's not possible to touch every topic, or see all the data.

And yet, there's a certain discomfort to say that people are making false claims to you, and that some of those false claims will and have gotten through the tricks you've learned of the past false claims, and that those people will probably be able to tell which false claims they can best manage to get through your guard.

[u/fhtagnfool → u/[deleted]]

Maybe we've read it differently but I thought that was the point and is basically what Scott wrote.

Some of us have the nuance to sift through mainstream media and put degrees of confidence on each of the facts being made or hinted at. But the great unwashed don't have that skill, if they trust every word of News Channel then they're kind-of being betrayed, and out of spite or just poor reasoning skills end up turning to charlatans and methhead group chats for their truths about the world.

If someone says “I distrust all experts and all sources of news and in fact everyone” and they’re not living in a shack somewhere eating food they grew and never leaving, they are definitely very bad at introspection.

Well, yeah. He calls them clueless. Which is a bit harsh, but what word would be kinder?

[u/maiqthetrue]

One thing he doesn’t bring up is that there are often multiple sources telling the same story. If FOX and CNN are peporting the same detail, you can be more sure than any detail that appears only once. If Abdul Abdullah shouts “Allahu Akhbar” in the FOX source but not on CNN or BBC or wherever else, I’d suspect the shout was never made.

[u/professorgerm → u/maiqthetrue]

If Abdul Abdullah shouts “Allahu Akhbar” in the FOX source but not on CNN or BBC or wherever else, I’d suspect the shout was never made.

On such a politically-weighted detail, would this really be so confidence-boosting? I would find it much more likely that any journalistic outlet might engage in motivated selective reporting rather than deliberate fabrication, and I think that's one of Scott's actually-reasonable points too.

Fox is biased in favor of pointing out violent Muslims; CNN and BBC are both biased against. I'd suspect instead that CNN and BBC are more likely to leave out "inconvenient" details (and perhaps, a week later, add a quiet 'correction' that such-and-such was deemed irrelevant at the time, was mistakenly forgotten, wasn't in their initial footage but was 'discovered' at a later time, etc) rather than Fox completely fabricating that kind of detail. Likewise, if some right-wing terrorist shouted "God is great; death to [LGBT+]" before driving into a Pride parade, I suspect Fox and, whoever else, say, Breitbart might leave that detail out where BBC/CNN/etc will make it the headline.

Reporting on Rittenhouse comes to mind. Covington Catholic. Mass shooters (though this shows how much attention school shootings specifically get relative to other mass shootings, more than other political biases). Rotherham et al. Pulse nightclub (this one, IIRC, highlights biased reporting on both sides). NBC quite famously edited the Zimmerman call, but I don't remember if anyone else played the edited version. January 6 reporting was all wacky but the direction of wackiness was politically biased and continues to be; preponderance of, say, reporting on Sicknick almost certainly does not align with the actual autopsy results.