Remember that evolution favors individuals who survive & gain status, not those whose representation of the world is true. Someone who is right but killed for it (eg. Copernicus) is still dead.
The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it. You can't outsource this to a communication platform, because it's inherently less comfortable and more effort for the reader, and the reader will just go to a competing communication platform that makes them feel better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
He died of natural causes at 70. According to viral stories at the time, moments after having seen the first print of his book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
People may also confuse Bruno with Galileo Galilei, who was punished by the Inquisition for his defense of Copernican theory, but not executed.
You are right, but I hope you are aware that this would require a giant leap to an essentially superhuman state of rationality and clear thinking for a vast majority of people.
Just stop for a moment and look around you. Is that how most people actually function in this world?
For large majorities of voters, dropping that ballot in the box is over 90% an identity game.
On an individual level, being active in (non-political) hobbies and volunteer groups can help, especially ones that attract both people from the cities and the countryside.
Fail to recognize that, and you've failed before you've started.
How is this different from stereotyping then?
What we need, fundamentally, is a media environment that can harness the collective capacity of humans to vet and debate new information in an organized fashion that can be trusted. This site is a good example where a knowledgeable community, and the simple mechanism of votes does some automatic, crowd-based content curation. But the Reddit-like model is very basic - so much more could possibly be done to allow individual users to contribute to a collective process of knowledge-building.
I think we need more development and discussion devoted to what kind of systems could be designed to encourage transparency, quality, and critical analysis in our news-making.
As a kid I learnt this and tried to be as rational and aware of my fallibalities as possible.
That makes you an alien to normal human beings. Conversation becomes impossible, processing fast enough becomes impossible, and the penalties for acting weird and communicating weird are huge.
Instead you need to find a way to act in a manner that allows you to blend in with people.
I'm not saying that one smart game is going to fix the entire problem, but adding the development of logic skills into the types of activities that people enjoy doing on Facebook is definitely possible.
Other humans are taking advantage of those gaps to mobilize votes or advertisements.
There's no way out and I've been wondering when people would realize the depth and intricacy of the mess we're in. Hopefully people pay more attention to the way cognitive cheat code are being abused.
Hopefully a protocol to deal with it can be made.
Exactly right. This should be strongly emphasized in our educational curriculum.
It's almost as if the way we understand and use money has hardened into a giant screwball of lies, base instincts, and perverse incentives.
Almost.
- The earth is flat
- 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Barack Obama was born in Kenya
- Anti-vax
- Climate change denial
- Anti-GMO
- Denial of underlying quantum randomness in the universe
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
- The minimum wage decreases employment
- Donald Trump has sexually assaulted a number of women
- Monetary policy impacts the real economy
- The sun will, on balance, probably rise tomorrow
I've sorted this in a (rough, personal) order of increasing plausibility / conformance with facts. Where is the line between misinformation and alternative information? As a human, it's pretty unclear to me.
If this correct I assume that there are also problem that are classified as AI-hard?
Some people can multiply ten digit numbers in their head. Some can't even tell you what a number is. There's a very wide bell-curve here.
Are there some confusing, emotionally laden, difficult questions of fact in there? Yes. Are some things ultimately unknowable (like what people want, which involves scrying into their minds)? Yes.
These, as it turns out, are not the things I can't help but be side-tracked on. I'm diverted by you claiming monetary policy has an effect with nearly the certainty of the sun rising.
I think perhaps we disagree more about the probability of these two:
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
Than the other two. I think both of those are, in some sense, almost certainly true. There are Muslims who want to implement Sharia law in Europe. The Clinton Foundation has been involved in transactions that at least have the appearance of moral uncertainty. The headlines that I listed are just overly strong statements/generalizations of those (IMO undeniable) facts.
"undeniable" does not mean what you think it means. Example: http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/hillary-clinton-defends-founda...
There, Clinton denies the foundation has been engaged in anything shady. Boom, definitely not undeniable #hackernewsdrama, hahaha.
If you want a disagreement, though, I prefer many-worlds over pilot wave theories, largely because I'm not entirely sure _what_ the propagation speed of the pilot waves would be. 'Greater than the speed of light' either (1) doesn't really narrow it down at all or (2) narrows it down to having no options at all. But they should have _a_ speed, because I'm not sure you can even have standing waves if the disturbances propagate instantly.
It didn't cause the hyperinflation that a lot of people thought would come, but the Great Depression is Bernanke's area of expertise, and he had sound theoretical reasons to believe QE wouldn't spark serious inflation.
This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles.
It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.
I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem.
Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here:
def source_is_trustworthy(source):
return False
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
[0] http://observer.com/2016/08/wikileaks-reveals-mainstream-med...
I used to try to apply a correctional factor, but I've found it not even worthwhile anymore. I honestly don't know entirely why. I don't know if the news has gotten that much more biased to the point where it almost swamps the signal entirely, or if the combined financial pressures away from expensive real reporting and towards click-bait headlines has removed the signal, or what, but beyond very bare facts they just aren't worth much anymore. It is also possible this has always been the case and I wasn't aware enough to realize it; there's some classic history stories that back that possibility up.
I do know primary sources are getting easier and easier to consult directly. Which could itself also be a reason my opinion of them has plummeted so much in the past 10 years; it was a lot harder to see through media spin and simplification (deliberately for their audience, and accidentally when they in fact don't understand what's going on themselves, see especially science journalism for that) when they were the only source of information.
What is the correct balance of endorsements? Is anything other than 50:50 incorrect?
It won't be reached in practice, but if you make it the policy, you have an argument to take down any bullshit. With 50:50 it's going to be an endless quarrel over who has had enough so far, who is underrepresented and why everything is dominated by two polar opposites with no voice given to people who don't want to belong to either camp.
Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls".
Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.
Here's a pagerank like reputation system i've built.
Consistency is simply majority wins, which completely stifles new ideas or minority opinions.
No isn't.
You don't need to have a "non objective view of the truth" - i..e you don't need the ability to ask the system "Is this statement true?"
You just need the ability to ask the system "Will I think this is true, given the other things I have claimed to be true?"
Maintaining internal complexity of your own claim graph gets really tricky unless you keep it as accurate as possible.
For example, consensus view was that trump would not win the election. Trump did win the election. Thus, those two claims:
* (before) Trump will not win * (later) Trump won
These two are inconsistent. It's possible to rectify that inconsistency by marking the earlier statment cancelled. So now we have three statements
* (before) Trump will not win * (later) Trump won * (now) I was wrong to say, "Trump will not win."
The gap between "now" and "Before" can be used to compute "probability of a statement being retracted." The smaller those gaps, the more likely it is what whatever you say comes with an asterisk next to it, saying "the expected time to retraction of this statement is: x days"
I was speaking of consistency with the general body of knowledge in the system, (correspondence?).
In the specific case of evaluating major news sources for trust, I think the vast majority of their statements are never retracted/changed, and therefore they would rate highly on an overall "constancy" scale as well. Their many statements about Trump's likelihood of winning were very constant as well - for months they said he'd lose, then they changed, and forever after they will say he won.
Sounds very temporally consistent, with just a single change.
Not sure if the adjudicator could narrow it just to "trust of the source's future predictions about politics", but basically the whole country just got a negative feedback on the trust weighting for major media in that domain.
Sum (from: 0, to: PosInf, Enumerable: Source - Bias)
converges asymptotically to Truth
Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.
Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.
I think polling is pretty broken though. A lot has changed from 20 years ago when everyone had a landline phone.
1. Editors/writers/management changes, since quite a few media publications have gone from being fairly reliable to biased as all hell based purely on who's taken over there. Or in some (rarer cases), the opposite has happened.
So you'd have to make sure older less biased pieces weren't being punished for the actions of the publication in the present.
2. A lot of sources are correct about some things but not about others. It's very possible to have a publication that's terrible at writing about politics in an accurate and unbiased way, but fantastic at writing about technology or sports. So ideally your system would have to detect the subject of the article as well as the publication.
However, I guess you could at least add known 'satire' and fake information sites to a 'non credible' list. Like the ones listed here:
On the one hand, they seem more interested in fact-checking. On the other, they propagate concepts like: on-balance the US is a force for good and should lead the world. This is highly contentious and non-obvious for many (most?) people outside the US.
It's actually at its best when it is truly social, in all senses of the word. When it facilitates real communication on real issues across a broad spectrum of people. When it spreads information, not misinformation.
I agree with others that detecting misinformation in the general case likely requires a theory of mind, and so something approaching "real" AI. I also agree that FB has a serious problem on their hands. And I'm so very glad I don't use it.
[1] I advance no comment here about the correctness of that; just a comparison to illustrate what seems like an overlooked point.
The solution to not becoming a battleground which is inherantly destabilizing to the platform is to not grow, or only grow in a single direction. State up front what your targeted user base is and keep to them. NeoGAF as a "gamers only" forum will survive a very long time, for instance.
Facebook has sidestepped it by becoming a personal community for each user, but whenever they try to connect that personal community to the wider world through "shared" news, "shared" trends etc that are not personalized it causes a big ruckus.
It's not the cat pic sharing that is paid for by entities with motive and interest in spreading misleading messages.
In Poland, for good half year before our presidential election, then a year after I was getting obviously paid for posts from dozens upon dozens of right wing extremists.
I am left-centrist (although my dad jokes at me that im a bolshevik). I don't have many friends who skew righ-wing either. Yet, there was my wall, chock full of sensationalist bs, for over A YEAR
Wonder how much money Facebook earned in that time just from sad little Poland
I love idealists, but it's time to take an honest accounting of the differences between the promises of the internet and the actuality.
The fact is that large and increasing quantities of our social communication now occur online.
I'm not claiming this is salutary or calling it a good thing. I'm just stating the fact.
Not trying to be pedantic here. It's just important to sort out the terms used if any analysis is going to be useful. What's happening on facebook is not social. It's bits of data around being social. Different thing entirely. Perhaps we need a new term for whatever it is, but whatever we call it, it's not the same as face-to-face real socializing with real people.
We assume positive intent online because otherwise we get flame wars, but there's a helluva lot of body language and inflection that can take the comment you made and make it mean a dozen things. All of that is lost. And all of it is important.
In addition to the nuance, would I know severine if I saw them on the street? Miss them if they died? Remember the nice way they did X everytime we met?
We are exchanging written opinions and statements, yes. These exchanges also occur in social interactions. But we are not socializing. There's no bond here that's become stronger, no subtle nuance or interplay that we're managing at a subconscious level. For all either of us knows, the other one is a bot. Or an alien. There's no humanity here.
Let's take our relationship, for example. I've been cohabiting some of the same online spaces as you for at least the last decade. For me, you are a valued part of that ecosystem, more so than most of my physical neighbors who I chat with in person a couple times a year.
No, I wouldn't recognize you on the street, but I struggle with face blindness, so it's a weak criterion. Would I "miss you" if you died? No, but I'd certainly reflect sadly on your death if I learned about it. "Remember the nice way you did X"? No, but I have trouble coming up with such an X most people I interact with locally.
There's no humanity here.
I'm surprised you would say this. Is this a recent change in your view of online interactions or have you always felt this way? Quantitively I find about the same amount of humanity here as I do elsewhere, and qualitatively I prefer many things about what I find here to what I see when I go out in person. Are you OK?
(ps. I notice that many of the links in the sidebar of your site are broken.)
It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).
You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
It basically needs to be serious enough to overwhelm the internal incentives of maximizing key performance indicators.
I would say they don't do so because of micro-optimized KPI targeting: they do so because they feel time on Facebook is valuable and makes them happy. If Facebook can't deliver increases in that, then optimizations only take them so far.
I can't imagine an unprecedented breaking news story that has no basis in any factual information. I'm not talking about an upvoter here, but primarily a downvoter (incongruence with accepted facts being easier to prove than vice versus).
There's no fundamentally creative step in deciding "How well does this new piece of information match pieces I previously had"?
From an untrustworthy collection of input relationships, how do I produce the most reliably correct output?
Nevertheless, I agree that if anyone can do it algorithmically, it would probably be Google.
I'd like it if it was, but I've never witnessed popularity that embodies that statement.
Popular opinion is usually informed by the most often repeated narrative.
The Allen AI group has been working on solving year 4 multiple choice science tests for about 3 years. They now score a bit over 60% correct, and that is a much easier task.
Everything has to be right for an answer option to be correct. Only one thing has to be wrong for it to be incorrect.
Choosing a random story from politifact: http://www.politifact.com/missouri/statements/2016/nov/06/ro...
Like most false stories, there is a hint of truth to this but that doesn't make it true. Politfact spends 3 pages discussing it, and concludes:
Courts did object in three cases to decisions Kander made as secretary of state. But the specifics of those cases are much more nuanced than Blunt lets on. And the claim that Kander tried to manipulate the election is, at best, unproven.
A SOTA computer system could probably parse that last paragraph I posted, but couldn't get anywhere near getting close to doing the research needed to get to that conclusion. We are years off that (I work on research in this area)
A lot of claims that were made this cycle are rooted in measured quantities where the measurements we have disagree with the claims.
If there is at least one rape or at least one illegal immigrant then it becomes subjective or contextual.
Is 3 rapes a flood? What if it is in a week in one town? What if one was by a former illegal immigrant? What if it is over the course of a year, but all 3 occurred in one day?
Is 20 illegal immigrants a flood? What if they all arrive in a town with a population of 100?
Who is "we"? Is a story about millions of illegal immigrants in Greece relevant? What if it about thousands of illegal immigrants working in Athens? What if Athens is in Georgia?
A real example:
"Broken Families: Raids Hit Athens' Immigrant Community Hard" vs "Athens crackdown shows no hospitality for illegal migrants"
One is a real headline from Georgia, the other from Greece. Can you tell which is which?
The Jews say they are waiting for the Messiah.
The Christians say the Messiah came once and will come again.
The Muslims say there is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet.
Which of these groups is correct?
I would love to see the AI algorithm that can finally settle this issue! Seriously, mad props to the programmer who writes that code!
float IsStatementAboutFacts(string statement); // Returns confidence estimateSome of their statements pass the first filter, far fewer pass the second.
I'm however doubtful that a "successful" social network would learn from struggling one. Well C'est la vie.
This can't be fixed at Facebook scales by building a platform that so highly incentivizes low-quality content of all kinds, then trying to stop the content so late in the cycle. The entire incentive structure has to be rethought. Unfortunately, that's probably a problem that Facebook is literally incapable of solving without going out of business, because Facebook the corporate entity is that incentive structure. To fix Facebook requires Facebook to become not-Facebook.