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Misinformation: The First Digital Drug

73 点作者 staccatomeasure超过 4 年前

19 条评论

ve55超过 4 年前
&gt;The current situation in the US is challenging. Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories are rampant in every cohort of society.<p>Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I&#x27;ve seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect). It&#x27;s simply much more visible now due to the Internet being widely adopted, whereas in the past you&#x27;d never know what people across the world (or even your own city) may have been thinking about.<p>Since there is no stable nor global solution to the problem of deciding who gets to label&#x2F;regulate information, nor any evidence showing that <i>even with the regulation of information</i>, people actually change their beliefs to the &#x27;correct&#x27; ones, I don&#x27;t personally see merit in this path. The temptation to find a solution is sensible prima facie, but history and human psychology show us that this is a fool&#x27;s errand.
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m_herrlich超过 4 年前
Some of the things people currently believe are so patently absurd and obviously made up that labeling them as false would not make much difference. It&#x27;s would be just one more conspiracy vector.<p>Even if it did, how could the regulators possibly keep up with the gish gallop of misinformation? There are those who seriously examine and rebut the claims of q-anon et al. but can you imagine a more thankless task?<p>A better approach is to teach good informational hygiene to kids. Pull from a variety of information sources, weight the ones that correct errors, awareness and taxonomy of cognitive biases, stuff like that.
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andrei_says_超过 4 年前
“ Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.”<p>From Matt Taibbi’s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taibbi.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;we-need-a-new-media-system" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taibbi.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;we-need-a-new-media-system</a>
UncleOxidant超过 4 年前
&gt; Most progressive thinking is moving towards more legalization and treatment, vs banning and punishment... Treat it like we’re starting to treat drugs<p>I&#x27;m all for the direction that drug policy is going (towards more treatment, less prison time - I live in Oregon and we&#x27;re on the forefront of this in the US) but I&#x27;m not sure how this would work in regards to misinformation. How do we get conspiracy theorists into treatment? Won&#x27;t they just figure that&#x27;s part of the conspiracy to re-educate them? And a lot of this disinformation is coming from bad actors with intent to harm.<p>The epistemic gap is, I think the most serious problem we face now. We can&#x27;t address other serious problems like climate change or even getting COVID vaccines out to people because there&#x27;s disinformation. We seem to be completely unprepared to deal with this. The immune system offers an analogy - we need a societal immune system that attacks disinformation in some way. No idea how we get there, though.
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ahepp超过 4 年前
I would classify this (and much of the current discourse about mis&#x2F;disinformation) as &quot;not even wrong&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s difficult for me to express my thoughts on the matter without writing a huge, unintelligible screed.<p>The author, like many others, considers misinformation a disease that can be cured by using authority to administer objective information.<p>I feel strongly that we no longer have any choice but to accept all information is based in trust. This is not meant to be a metaphysical statement. Perhaps at the metaphysical level, objective truth exists. Regardless, at the scale society needs to verify information, objectivity is inaccessible.<p>Consider how long it took Russel&#x27;s <i>Principia</i> to add 1+1. For the claims we encounter in our everyday lives, an appeal to objectivity will only add another layer of obfuscation.<p>In the case of current crisis in the US, the government claims that the crisis is an attack by the Russians. Perhaps this is true on a superficial level, but the attack is only possible because sources of power in our society abuse that society&#x27;s trust so heavily. This isn&#x27;t only limited to the government, but the entire structure of power.<p>The Q conspiracy is on its face absurd and easily contradicted by reliable observations. Why do adherents engage in it? At some point when you&#x27;re surrounded by lies on every side and no way to understand your environment, your brain just melts.<p>Unfortunately there is no sign that society will even stop digging itself into this hole.
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numpad0超过 4 年前
Took me too long to realize following: when a person says “there’s too many lies in the media and I can’t believe anything anymore”, they do not have anything concrete about said <i>lies</i> but sheer volume of apocryphal narratives thrown at them is causing erratic behaviors.<p>It’s a known incorrect error message that human interpret statements as “baseless”, “false” or “lie” in certain corner cases, like how some computer GUI shows “disk full” or “permission denied” or “irrecoverable hardware error” for running out of inodes or exceeding filesize limits. It should not be taken literally.<p>I can’t immediately point at a solution but overloading them further by giving more precise informations isn’t one.
DonaldFisk超过 4 年前
The article fails to make a distinction between misinformation (untruthful, false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead) and disinformation (dishonest, deliberately misleading or biased information). All disinformation is misinformation *, but not all misinformation is disinformation. And I don&#x27;t see how a comparison with drugs is helpful.<p>There are two things that can be done:<p>One is requiring misinformation to be corrected, with penalties for disinformation. This won&#x27;t be popular with free speech advocates, but maybe they should reconsider whether malicious lies (which have adverse consequences) ought to be protected. There&#x27;s also the more practical problem that the disinformation might not be detected, or detected too late.<p>The other is to ensure that people are educated from an early age to spot dubious information and fallacious reasoning, and learn how to fact-check sources. An understanding of science (along with its acceptance of being proven wrong), history, and folklore is also helpful.<p>* There are rare exceptions to this.
filoeleven超过 4 年前
The article title is a bit of a misnomer. Television has been with us for about a century now, and although it was not digital until more recently, TV likewise fits the definition of “a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.”<p>Misinformation has always been a part of television, whether knowingly or not. Most people will fall down when shot: not because a bullet actually knocks you over, but because you’ve learned that that’s what happens from watching TV shows and movies.<p>Even without that, the parallels are clear, especially if we take “drug” to mean a recreational or illicit drug. Terence McKenna (who had lots of wild ideas that must be individually evaluated; you can’t trust him) said decades ago that if there was a pill you could take that encouraged you to sit on your couch for 4+ hours a day and “blot out the real world,” they’d have made it illegal ages ago.<p>I am not dismissing the dramatic rise of misinformation over the past decade or so. To me, it looks a lot more like the spiking of heroin with fentanyl than the heroin itself. The addiction was already present; it’s just gotten a lot more dangerous to consume.
jaredwiener超过 4 年前
A big part of the issue is the economics.<p>Disinforomation can be funded through all sorts of ways. The truth needs a patron.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nillium.com&#x2F;news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.nillium.com&#x2F;news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...</a>
mancerayder超过 4 年前
How myopic. Insane beliefs have existed long before Internet-enabled information spread. Over half of the US believes that astrology is real. I remember reading in the early 2000&#x27;s a survey showing a majority of Americans believing angels exist. Should we talk about religion?<p>I&#x27;ll tell you what&#x27;s happening, here. Journalists are encouraging a Zeitgeist of censorship, prepping us all for Internet censorship to protect us from ourselves. That&#x27;s because the young people who are behind Medium blogs and WP op eds and Vox articles are too young to have a collective memory of censorship in the West jn and before WWII, the McCarthy years, the wars to decriminalize porn, and much more.<p>Because of myopia we want to go backwards in our liberal democracies. All this because you&#x27;re worried that your neighbor will believe Alex Jones or not get a vaccine?<p>I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world.
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Bukhmanizer超过 4 年前
I think the best way of combatting misinformation is with internet hygiene.<p>Recently I’ve moved to a mostly text based internet. I’ve changed the sites I go to for entertainment (Reddit, Twitter) to basically only show text by default, and it’s crazy how much less inundated I feel by the news. With less information, I feel much more equipped to separate out what is real and what is fake. I’ve also made an active attempt to separate news and information from entertainment.<p>There are [studies](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3758&#x2F;s13423-012-0292-0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.3758&#x2F;s13423-012-0292-0</a> ) showing that people are generally ok at dealing with misinformation, but if you show them text on images(especially emotive), or show them misinformation when their guards are down, they are much more likely to believe it.
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zug_zug超过 4 年前
For victimless misinformation (e.g. &quot;Earth is flat&quot;) I see no problem with this approach.<p>For politically motivated misinformation (e.g. &quot;Stop the steal&quot;) I think recent events show we should pretty clearly play it extra safe (e.g. ban the dealer) until we figure out how to reduce the risk of it being weaponized against democracy.
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alfl超过 4 年前
The first “digital drug” moral panic I remember was ASMR... or maybe video games.
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agumonkey超过 4 年前
I can&#x27;t help the feeling that the old world, as slow and imperfect as it was, had a better sense of pace and filters.
AndrewBissell超过 4 年前
Perhaps the first step should be to address the rot and corruption that pervades every major institution of our society. Once that&#x27;s done we can see how much of a problem remains with misinformation. Just inventing more sophisticated ways to insist to people that &quot;everything is fine and the only real problem is the people like you who won&#x27;t buy into that party line&quot; isn&#x27;t going to get anywhere.
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carapace超过 4 年前
If you haven&#x27;t studied hypnosis and something called Neurolinguistic Programming (the other NLP) you are basically out-of-the-loop when it comes to what&#x27;s going on today.<p>The simplest way to put it is that we&#x27;re caught in &quot;a war between rival gangs of hypnotists.&quot;<p>(You know the old saw about poker? &quot;If you don&#x27;t know who the sucker at the table is, it&#x27;s you.&quot;? Along the same lines, if you don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;m talking about, you&#x27;re the sucker at the table.)<p>&quot;Misinformation&quot; isn&#x27;t a drug, it&#x27;s a kettle of viruses. Hypnotic programs. The messed up thing is that it doesn&#x27;t matter if they come from alien or homegrown cultures: once the virus is here it (really &quot;they&quot;: a virus is legion) becomes everyone&#x27;s problem, and it can mutate.<p>How do you fight hypnotists? I can&#x27;t tell you in a brief post like this. (And I&#x27;m not actually qualified anyway.) But I can leave you with a simple spell that works pretty well:<p>&quot;A trance is only as deep as you are.&quot;<p>Good luck, and God bless
amelius超过 4 年前
Well, fairy tales were the first digital drug I got, so this makes sense.
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carry_bit超过 4 年前
If misinformation is a drug by that definition, then truth would be a drug too. A potentially even more potent one at that.<p>We&#x27;ve already seen some drugs be restricted for political reasons. Do we wish risking that with truth also?
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nosmokewhereiam超过 4 年前
iDoser was the first digi-drug