How to Mislead with Facts

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead.<p>Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.<p>I can&#x27;t blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.<p>As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.

This conversation isn&#x27;t formal enough to be meaningful.<p>If you want to talk meaningfully about how &quot;facts&quot; are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn&#x27;t matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are <i>useless</i>.<p>In order to mislead with a &quot;true&quot; fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).<p>The essence of &quot;lying by telling the truth&quot; is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.<p>Fortunately, It&#x27;s much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.<p>Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.<p>Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with &quot;true&quot; implications.<p>I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn&#x27;t teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).

I love the idea of this article, but it doesn&#x27;t address the reason things are the way they are. Facts get checked for literal accuracy because that&#x27;s what&#x27;s easy to actually do in a reasonably unbiased way. We stop there not because that&#x27;s all we want, but because everything after that is too messy to even come close to systematizing.<p>If they&#x27;ve got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextualization, i&#x27;d love to hear about it, though.

This inevitably makes me think of a video about how meat consumption is not as bad by &quot;things I&#x27;ve learned&quot; on youtube. Search for that name and &quot;meat&quot; and you will inevitably find it. I thiught the claims in the video sounded too good to be true, so I read the study most of the claims in the video were based on.<p>They were comparing against a scenario where we kept producing the food fed to animals, but that humans had to eat it. Which meant no actual land gains, only a modest reduction in co2 emissions, and that people would become unhealthy by eating 4500kcal&#x2F;day, mostly from corn.<p>Even worse than the 3.1mn views is that the study in question was covered positively on TV and in newspapers.

From that article:<p><i>Our task is to create new processes for determining what counts as a shared, socially meaningful, mutually understood “truth.” Obviously, this requires more than making sure that every fact is checked.</i><p>It&#x27;s recognizing with double quotes &quot;truth&quot; as a different thing than Truth. Hence it&#x27;s a confession that their task is to &quot;create a new process for determining what counts as &#x27;truth&#x27;&quot; and not genuine fidelity to reality. This means that the process they claim to desire will have, by design, the backdoor of the shared illusion effect. In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That&#x27;s not science, not professional journalism, that&#x27;s Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.<p>Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can&#x27;t have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).

Adversarial wielding of facts could be the basis for a new model of public knowledge, one that corrects the shortcomings of current news media and social networks.<p>Causal mapping [1] websites can aggregate the back and forth of heated discussions, eliminating emotional responses and distilling the core ideas of each opposing position. Such compilation of facts an argument in a readable, neutral format (e.g. see Kialo)[2] could work like the academic debates of old, allowing facts to be analysed in context and the validity of arguments to be tested on their own merits, not on their emotional appeal.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_causal_mapping_software#Causal_mapping_software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_causal_mapping_softwar...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kialo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kialo.com&#x2F;</a>

The New York Times mastered all this long ago.<p>It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all.<p>Hans Blix&#x27;s UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq&#x27;s entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any primary source information indicating Russian interference in the 2016 election was easy to avoid mentioning anywhere.

I get the feeling this article was written by very smart people with noble intentions coming from backgrounds quite similar to mine.<p>I found it tremendously unsatisfying.<p>This is surely an unfair simplification, but I think, at the heart, it expresses a desire for goodness. A world where people cared about each other and made decisions based on caring about others. (That may sound flippant, and would require more explanation on my part, but I have considered this closely.)<p>If that is part of the desire driving this project, I can sympathize with that. But I cannot feel much hope for the approach I am struggling to understand from this article.<p>My alternative suggestion, which again might sound flippant, even more ineffective, boring, or unoriginal, but is also considered and sincere, is to focus on the very small ways we can make tangible goodness for the people we encounter most closely in life. I think it was said better, though, as &quot;love thy neighbor as thyself.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a little more to say about all that too, but it would be a good start.

Getting to the truth is really difficult.<p>For example, in a court of law, where you have a handful of jurors, some witnesses, a carefully curated set of rules, and highly trained professionals guiding the process. Errors are made. The truth is not always found and an innocent person gets locked up or a guilty one walks free.<p>Epistemology is an ancient practice. In the western tradition this was first pointed out over 2,000 years ago.<p>Then there is the problem that human beings are not rational actors and it gets a whole lot messier.

One big reason for the rise in both far right and far left extremists is that mainstream media has mastered this practice a long time ago. This is why people don&#x27;t inherently fully trust mainstream news that is mostly bought and paid for aka submarine PR. Catch &amp; kill and China buying articles in the MSM weren&#x27;t revelations, they were just confirming everyone&#x27;s suspicions.

&gt; What if we really wanted to understand what was going on in a way that accounted for all the facts and their various frames and interpretations?<p>Then we are demonstrating a level of good faith and interest that seems missing in most discourse.<p>I like the drive behind this - to really get to the bottom of things and promote rational comprehension rather than have people simply sniping at each other with misunderstood datapoints - but I&#x27;m not sure a lot of the people who are engaging in such behaviour are really that interested. As mentioned in the article, what they are really after is ammunition.<p>Still, I welcome this, as it&#x27;s far better than just throwing up our collective hands and deciding any attempt to improve the quality of public discussion is necessarily censorship.

Tinkerbell School of Progress. Clap louder and surely Tinkerbell will fly. Like the evergreen advice to teach critical thinking. Certain to work. Next time.<p>There&#x27;s no profit in pursuing &quot;truth&quot; in the face of tenacious anti-truth. Truthiness is an outgrowth of identity. And identity is impervious to logic, reason, facts.<p>The best we can do is help ourselves navigate the chaos.<p>It&#x27;s a real simple checklist:<p>- Share your work.<p>- Cite your sources.<p>- Sign your name.<p>And then you can start productive analysis, fact checking, verification. Anything less should be treated as gossip, propaganda, or trolling (distraction).<p>Lastly, I have no idea what to do about identity.

Tangentially, some years ago I recall reading a few articles about the problem with &#x27;misconception busting&#x27; articles [I may try to find such an article later]. Apparently, content formatted like...<p>&gt; <i>Myth:</i> Spinach has a high iron content<p>&gt; <i>Fact:</i> Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content<p>... actually tends to <i>reinforce the misconception</i> in readers.<p>This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.

&quot;There are no facts, only interpretations.&quot; - Nietzsche

Most of the times &quot;fact&quot; wars or &quot;culture&quot; wars are just covert interest wars. Just ask yourself who benefits and how, pull from the string, and most &quot;facts&quot; will just dissolve on a carefully crafted narrative that has nothing to do with the truth and a lot to do with gaining or not losing some type of power.

I just don’t understand the need for fact checkers in an age of instant access to information. Anyone who wants to stick to their priors, can. Anyone who wants to delegate has an array of choices to choose from. And those who want (and have the time) to chase deeper comprehension themselves can do so (still delegating some here and there, recursively).<p>This is why every material must point to its source(s), and have full disclosure from the author.

I saw an example of how one could make the claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and it worked like this:<p>population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it&#x27;s a true statement, it&#x27;s a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2&#x2F;84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.<p>And that&#x27;s the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter&#x27;s statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person&#x27;s main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that&#x27;s where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There&#x27;s a giant asymmetry here and we don&#x27;t address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.

I appreciate that they didn&#x27;t blame one &quot;side&quot; here, just described what&#x27;s happening.

This article is desperately in need of some examples. I can&#x27;t believe there isn&#x27;t one.

The person reading this drinks engine coolant.<p>That is absolutely truthful.<p>I will omit to mention that engine coolant is water.

I have established a way of dealing with and taking from &#x27;facts&#x27; by following these steps:<p>1. What is said? Do I understand it? Where does it come from?<p>2. How is it to be understood? How to interpret it?<p>3. What does it signify? Can it be classified and&#x2F;or compared with other known things?<p>4. What can be taken from it? What implications does it have?<p>Looking at news in this way, it is clearly visible, how most things that are communicated answer 3. and 4., omitting its foundations 1. and 2. Sometimes the bias is created by changing 2.<p>(The fine-definition of the steps is still in the works. So far, I am very happy with this method. It helps me a lot to understand things and what things are really about. Suggestions?)

This gives me an odd feeling.<p>They seem to spend a lot of time undermining confidence in fact checkers, to then concede, nearer the end that you have to check facts as part of their new better approach.<p>The fact checkers I would reference, already do these things, so I don&#x27;t really see what is being added here except some emotive language that seems to be saying &quot;well, you can prove anything with facts&quot; which feels like it&#x27;s going in the wrong direction.<p>Reading all the other comments, there&#x27;s a strong vibe of &quot;see, I told you I was right to ignore factcheckers&quot;.

Faster heustistic is to check not whether the facts are true, but if the implied conflict that connects them is real.<p>The old adage about how &quot;dog bites man,&quot; may be true but it&#x27;s not news, whereas &quot;dog bites capitalist oppressor&quot; is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash of exploitation and seized the means of food production in its righteous jaws of justice on behalf of the global oppressed, but by manufacturing the conflict that links the facts, an entirely contrived fabrication qualifies as not entirely un-true.<p>Simply, just ask whether the facts are used as decoration and plumage for what reduces to an extravagent lie.

It seems to me lying with facts boils down to two techniques:<p>1. Misrepresenting the central tendency by presenting outliers as representative.<p>2. Presenting credentialed but agenda-driven authorities who argue in bad faith to affirm that these outliers <i>are</i> representative and pre-empt the listener&#x27;s getting a competing, and actually representative, interpretation from other authorities.

Specific facts when a reader doesn’t know the entire story can frame the story however the author wants. Without existing knowledge of the details, a reader has no way of discerning the difference.<p>If two guys punch each other and then shake hands, but you only publish the “fact” that one of them threw a punch you’re framing the story…with facts.

But what context is important or relevant or true? It&#x27;s turtles all the way down.<p>What we need is humility and good faith.

The PR teams create perceptions and narratives by misleading with facts on social media, in ways mentioned in this article. But I think people get it after a while and it can&#x27;t be used for long term perceptions and narratives.

Would be great if the author included some actual real life examples. This is why I find Chomsky so convincing. He usually presents his argument with lots of evidence.

That was an interesting article, I don&#x27;t want to steal it&#x27;s thunder or anything, but damn, I love the layout. It is gorgeous.<p>Looks like a magazine, elegant, no cruft.

Theses and Antitheses, has always worked, but since Covid all those &quot;Experts&quot; &amp; &quot;Scientists&quot; have discarded this essential framework.

&gt; the practice of weaponizing facts<p>This increasingly common use of the word &quot;weaponize&quot; (as a dysphemism for &quot;utilize&quot;) bothers me, as does the article&#x27;s use of the phrase &quot;information war.&quot;<p>As horrible as it is to spread disinformation and propaganda, it seems unnecessarily extreme to describe that as analogous or comparable to warfare or physical violence.

&quot;If you want to lie with facts, use statistics.&quot; - anonymous

What I wonder about is how does making blind with beliefs work

How about they apply their own theory to the framing of ‘information warfare’ that they simply assume as a factual part of what is happening but make no attempt to investigate?<p>Obviously there is literal information warfare in the sense of state funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns.<p>But that doesn’t seem to explain most of what I observe, which seems a lot more to do with vastly increased access to contradictory information as a result of the internet, coupled with a lack of institutional transparency. That doesn’t look like ‘war’ to me, but rather just that our institutions haven’t adapted to the presence of the internet yet.

Looks like a wonderful project! Society&#x27;d seem to do well to focus on how we can have real, honest dialogs. Current forums for stuff like political debates have malicious, deceptive strategies that may work better than honest ones, which just seems like a bad thing for society as a whole.<p>The solution&#x27;d seem to be to have cultural dialogs, e.g. on politics, occur on platforms where optimal strategies are constructive. This is, where deceptive strategies would lose out to honest ones.

Slightly different perspective: facts are completely unimportant, because:<p>- what seems like a fact may not be a &quot;fact&quot; at all, it may be a misunderstanding<p>- knowing all the known facts may give you a false sense of understanding of the truth; one more fact can change your entire outlook... and yet one more can change that... you don&#x27;t know the facts you don&#x27;t know<p>If certain truths are probable, the facts known today (or perceived as knowable today) should not get in the way of exploring them.<p>Do not let any fact or a collection of facts get in the way of your exploration of the truth.<p>If one is extremely conservative, it may seem like a good idea to only stick to what is already known (i.e. the &quot;facts&quot;) but even then, because of the fact that you can never be sure that everything there is to know is known at this time, one should still keep an open mind.

The problem is policy.<p>Imagine two friends, Alice and Bob. Alice thinks COVID is not a problem. Doesn&#x27;t mask, hasn&#x27;t had a single shot, all the rest. Bob is terrified of COVID. Masks up at home, space bubble helmet outside, all the rest.<p>The only outcome that works is Alice and Bob agreeing that they have different risk preferences. That they each should live their lives in accordance, but that they have no right to force each other to adopt the same behaviors. Bob gets used to doing a lot of stuff over Zoom, and Alice gets used to doing a lot more Zoom calls than she did before.<p>What if, instead, Bob tries to force the entire world to wear masks all the time, and undergo an endless stream of boosters, all in order to satisfy his risk preference? Alice will respond in-kind, and now we&#x27;re in a tit-for-tat situation. Endless retaliation.<p>Now, imagine that Bob has political power, and can mandate his desires into law. Bob has now used deadly force -- the police -- to coerce Alice into doing what he wants.<p>Alice, being a big fan of consent, is having none of it... and that&#x27;s where we are today.<p>Same would be true if the roles were reversed.

cherry picked article :)