Fake news is not the real problem

59 点作者 rwx------超过 7 年前

15 条评论

losvedir超过 7 年前

I've been thinking about this a lot as news articles like this one[1] come up in my feed.This whole anti-tech Russian backlash has me so down trodden. Like who cares if Russia bought ads? Who cares if Russia uses those sites and tweets or shares a photo or whatever. I learned long ago to tune out ads and not trust anything I read on the internet, or at least read with a hefty helping of salt.I wish the outcome of all these revelations about how Russia (and I'm sure other countries or random people or corporations with various interests) was using facebook, twitter, instagram, etc, was for people to go, "oh, that's good to know. I guess I should believe whatever random posts I come across less." Not, "Uh oh! These services and ads are only for our certain, pre-approved uses, and we need to make laws enforcing that."We could have used these as a nice ol' inoculation in the meme war and improved ordinary people's understanding of just how the internet works (and doesn't work).[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&stream=top-stories" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_sourc...</a>

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Eupolemos超过 7 年前

> The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth.This is where it almost gets profound. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out, in his "On Bullshit", that the greatest danger isn't lack of truth or even direct falsehoods - it is when we give up searching for truth, or don't care about speaking truthfully. I.e. Bullshit.However, whatever the people can do to demand rigour and educate themselves on the matters, pales next to a media trying to hold itself to standards. When the media gives up, we are in dire straits indeed, if not utterly lost.Where I am from in Europe, we have pretty good media standards. But at least one of our biggest newspapers is actively working to muddle the waters for a party.Without being any kind of expert, other nations do not seem so well off.

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didibus超过 7 年前

For fun, let me suggest an absurd theory.Engineers used to be evenly distributed across non engineers, where they were able to influence family and friends with their methodical thinking. They used to be respected, seen as peers, part of the middle class like all others.Now, they've all relocated to the west. They command upper middle class salaries, most are the new rich.Eroded of their engineers, most of the country rallies behind their familiar team.Isolated and newly rich, the engineers are no longer being fed data about the average non engineer. Therefore they are applying the engineer rational to a biased subset of the data, limiting their effectiveness.And so here we are. Non engineers know the true reality of their problems, but don't have the tools to solve them. So they rally behind charlatans. While engineers have the skill set to solve problems, but no longer know the realities of the problems to solve.A dystopian future is sure to follow.

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ABCLAW超过 7 年前

>it’s that people have given up on that search for truth.No, it's that lowering the cost of information access also lowered the cost of DDOSing people with bullshit.It isn't that people don't care; it's that it is very inexpensive and very effective and very profitable to muddy the waters at scale.

jhiska超过 7 年前

Another way to see it is the Internet was supposed to make sharing what one understood as truth easier; instead, what it did was democratize Chomsky's propaganda model by making entry into becoming the media much cheaper; the Internet-based media newcomers essentially copied as best as they could the traditional media's model of _imposing_ their view of reality and manufacturing consent.In this view, what we're seeing is a power struggle for influence between the media who traditionally held the power to manufacture consent and the Internet-based newcomers.

ukulele超过 7 年前

> The real problem is that the engineer’s mindset, wherein one weighs the available evidence, and accept and incorporate new evidence even if it contradicts what you previously believed, has never been more rare.This is the author's premise. It would have been nice to get some discussion around why that is the case (or even that it is true), but alas the article simply states it.Ironic to provide no details given the subject matter.

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skookumchuck超过 7 年前

There was heavy manipulation of the media in favor of Clinton during the last election. Reddit, for example, was very active in promoting pro-Clinton news and downvoting pro-Trump news. It was so obviously an orchestrated campaign it was actually funny. CNN was relentlessly pro-Clinton. Clinton bought the machinery of the DNC to ensure her primary victory.Now, I'm not suggesting any of that is or should be illegal. But any discussion of Clinton losing because of propaganda should consider the converse.

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danielam超过 7 年前

The main thrust, that we ought to value the truth, is hard to disagree with. Certainly, it would be good if instead of adopting a Machiavellian ethos in which the goal is to "win" at all costs and where the spoken and written word isn't about communicating truths but rather functions as an instrument of manipulation and power, we were at least committed to the truth even as we honestly disagree.But what's this about an "engineering mindset"? It's an incredibly bizarre thing to appeal to in this context. Engineers are not somehow the quintessential pursuers of truth -- indeed, their pragmatic approach is less about the truth of the matter and more about effectiveness. Engineers are not, by virtue of being engineers, somehow particularly competent or qualified at understanding political issues. Politics is not a technology. Indeed, viewing politics in technocratic terms is positively dystopian. Perhaps the author of the article, writing for tech media, has fallen prey to the specialist's syndrome. To a hammer, everything is a nail.Furthermore, there is more to politics than just the evidence of the matter at hand. There are things which affect politics that are not political as such. The importance of truth, the proper relations between state, society and individual, and so on.

Hasknewbie超过 7 年前

> "The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth"I disagree. Most people have neither the time, inclination, or often the tools to "seek the truth" by themselves, and therefore they rely on the media to (in)form their views.Moreover there is such a thing as influencers and trend-setters. The media do not simply report on what people are expressing, they can also (and often very much do) set an agenda. Knowing this, it's journalists' duty to report the news accurately and not mix reporting with opinions, not manufacture or distort facts, and avoid feeding into the Outrage Economy and its endless echo chamber.By chance, I stumbled on a "meta-journalism" website just today, that analyses how mainstream print media (both left- and right-leaning) cover the news, it's pretty interesting. It's also often pretty damning. I hope they become better known:<a href="https://www.theknifemedia.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theknifemedia.com/</a>

wwweston超过 7 年前

Lest we as an audience be overly flattered by the "engineer's mindset," it's probably best to remind ourselves that in the field of software there are plenty of discussions and divisions that are frequently litigated in a tribal, adversarial manner. And that's just inside the field. Software engineers don't exactly end up uniformly distributed politically either.So either we don't apply the engineer's mindset all the time, or the engineer's mindset has limits itself when it comes to bringing consensus. I suspect it's both, but maybe particularly the latter: every problem human engineers care about includes human values at some level, and human values aren't equally weighted (or even shared at all) across humans.The mindset required to work on that last problem might not be engineer's mindset or lawyer's mindset.

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wh-uws超过 7 年前

While I agree with the articles sentiment I think missing enough with the engineers mindset is only part of the problem.I recently wrote thoughts on the rest of the problem (having honest disusssions about problems to gather the insight and data to engineer with in the first place).It was in response to a friend's social media post which read something to the effect of "Whats your most controversial opinion? No judgement""[... It] is nearly impossible to have completely honest versions of these conversations attached to your identity today because of a mixture of- extreme militantly politically correct culture- the existence of social media itself (allowing for identification and easy witch hunts from the comfort of your home)- and in aggregate many people operating from completely different and often incompatible belief systems and sets of factsFor instance try to have any conversation in public with even slightest bit of negativity about any group of humans that are not rich, male, and white.People in most of western civilization today would be hard pressed to voice any opinions because they would instantaneously be labeled a "fascist", "misogynist" , "racist", or a litany of other "-ists" with a dizzying amount of speed and force.No matter how well you argue any point you are now inextricably linked with some "-ism".Someone screenshots this opinion and posts to a group like Occupy Democrats with a person's full name...And bam life quite possibly on the way to ruin.It will affect your social and professional lives for quite some time.I feel like until we can come to some form of consensus around the state of the world and how to use observations about it to discuss it we will continue to have situations where people cannot understand each others side and constantly talk past each other to all our detriment."

natecavanaugh超过 7 年前

Our post modern culture has now taken to saying things like "my truth" and "your truth", as if it can be possessed and is unique to individuals. But there does seem to be a general lack of understanding or belief that truth is outside of our personal perception.It doesn't surprise me that we can't seem to agree on what's true when we identify truth as somehow representing me or you, and therefore we have a personal stake in defending "our truth" rather than seeking "the truth" as best we can understand it.

anigbrowl超过 7 年前

It’s the Internet’s fault, we’re told.No. Pointing out the existence of the internet as a vector for propaganda doesn't mean people are blaming the existence of the communication medium.

fareesh超过 7 年前

The discussion between Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro and Sara Fischer on the future of news is a great watch for anyone interested in this subject. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOxmIjiRqTw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOxmIjiRqTw</a>

pfarnsworth超过 7 年前

Of course a writer for Techcrunch believes that fake news is not the problem. That's like the NRA saying that guns don't kill people, people kill people.The problem is that we are so deluged with inaccurate articles written by bloggers who have no real concept of journalistic integrity. We can't tell what is real and what is fake. So what happens is that people will start rejecting all news.There's no accountability for writing shitty and inaccurate articles, and that's the problem. They believe that news can be buggy like software and can be corrected later, but it's not. It should be held to a higher standard because we rely on it.All that will happen now is that people will stop believe everything they read and even worse, they're going to stop caring. That is extremely dangerous for us as a society because it means people can start doing things in broad daylight and no one will believe it or care. This appears to be what this current administration is doing and Republicans don't appear to fear the consequences, because they're right. There's a very loud minority but the vast majority are really starting to not care.