I would argue that this is the result of a free market of news. These media organizations only exist because they tell people what they want to hear. There's a huge market for that. In order to peddle anything, you have to get people to listen first, and you can't take listeners for granted in a society where the media is not controlled by the government.

If only it were that simple, that it's just serving people what they want. Running with that idea for a second, isn't what people want partly a function of propaganda, brainwashing and so on. The narratives that we're fed are largely those of the rich and powerful or, in the case of fringe views on social media, those of often unqualified people at best (and lunatics at worst). The metaphor of a market of people autonomously choosing news obfuscates a much more complex reality about why so many people want to hear nonsense or views that undermine their own interests?

You're correct that the reality is much more complex. To expand, I would say that people are indeed susceptible to propaganda, but only propaganda of a certain kind. It has to reinforce their preexisting biases. You can't just force any propaganda on any arbitrary person, that's not going to work. That's why I say people do it to themselves. They come to trust the public figures who tell them specifically what they specifically want to hear, and then this trust and good feeling can be exploited for other purposes.

That's not unique to any one political party. All political partisans are susceptible to propaganda, but only party-specific propaganda. There are different forms of propaganda on different sides that would never work on the other side.

Mm, I think that's true in some circumstances.

However, if people are put in a situation where the only information they have access to—or the only information given an official sanction—is the propaganda, then whether or not it conflicts with their existing biases, they're pretty unlikely to be able to refute it. Especially not over a long period of time.

Also worth noting that saying people "do it to themselves" only applies to adults: the adults who are "doing it to themselves" are, in fact, doing exactly what I described above to their children: providing an "official sanction" to only the propaganda that agrees with their biases, thus ensuring that their children grow up molded in the same way, with no easy way to make an informed choice for themselves.

> the adults who are "doing it to themselves" are, in fact, doing exactly what I described above to their children

To an extent, yes. However, there are a number of mitigating factors. (1) Individual parents vary widely in their persuasive skill. (2) If there are 2 parents, those 2 don't necessarily agree in their beliefs, which means mixed messages for the children. (3) The child's friends, neighbors, schools, and community are also important influences on the child. (4) Genetics guarantees individual differences regardless. (5) Kids have a natural tendency to rebel against their parents, regardless of the parent's beliefs.

A lot of kids turn out a lot like their parents. And a lot of kids don't. Some even become the opposite of their parents. So the parental influence is definitely a factor, but it's not inescapable.

In any case, most kids pay very little attention to politics or "hard news" before they reach voting age (or even after). The news consumption itself tends to occur mainly in adulthood.

There are many good points in this thread, which led me to this realization: kids are indeed not very interested in national politics, but they are very attuned to the social politics of their peers, which can be pretty cliquish, isolating and devisive.

The propaganda that we are concerned with here deliberately seeks to trigger these childish responses in adults. If you go around telling people that they are entitled to something which these other people are taking from them, you will get some disciples regardless of whether there is any merit to the claim. It is like a mountainside in snow: you will get many small avalanches, but now and again a big one will let loose and sweep everything away.

It is the result of the free market of news. Bad news drives out good, just as bad money drives out good.

(Bad as in quality, not as in pessimistic. Bad meaning emotional and inciteful rather than informative and constructive. Humans have proven they respond more to the former.)

A true free market requires full information—in this case, that means the ability to determine how trustworthy the "news" being provided by a particular organization is. And there's a big, big difference between an organization that presents genuine facts with a slant (though that can be problematic enough), or one that tries in good faith to provide genuine facts but sometimes fails, either due to bad actors within or simple incompetence, and one that knowingly presents verifiably false information.

"Free market" does not just mean "everyone (with enough money) gets to provide whatever they want, and call it whatever they want, and it's up to ordinary people to figure out what's reliable and what's not."

The genuine sources have issues like bias or sloppy investigating, that leads to outright lies too. For years the media was representing the gender wage gap as being a man and women in the same job with all attributes other than gender being equal (even Obama said this during a state of the union). That clearly isn't what the BLS study says (difference in occupations, in part, drive the wage gap on an aggregate level).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2020/03/31/grea...

Yes, all other things being equal including level of experience, a woman makes about 98% as a man.

But how many women are afforded the opportunities to attain the job and life experience it takes to make as much as a man at the same job?

Once again -- stop thinking equality and start thinking equity.

Considering women obtain degrees at a higher rate than men, I'd say there's just as much opportunity.

If you are alluding to family constraints, having a family is a choice. I'm a man with a family and I have seen many opportunities disappear as a result of my decision to have a family.

The U.S. lost 140,000 jobs last month. All of them -- 100% -- were held by women.

Women simply do not have the same opportunities that men do in this country.

News is basically a cheap form of entertainment nowadays. The clue really is in the name, it's just "new stuff" and humans seem hardwired to always want to be consuming "new stuff".

People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening.

Held accountable by whom? The government? Which is controlled roughly half the time by a party which you probably disagree with vehemently?

In countries in which the truth is defended as OP demands clowns don't tend it to make it into government in the first place, but I see your point it's hard to see how the US gets out of this cycle

Didn't Iceland literally have a clown for a mayor or something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3n_Gnarr

Comedian technically, but eh.

Ukraine as well.

Which countries?

"lies shouldn't be allowed" Uh huh, and who decides what is a lie? There is a term called "slippery slope" and free speech may have been its founding issue.

Courts. Even USA has laws against libel and slander, it's not like the status quo is that you can just say whatever you want with no fear of consequences.

But who’s paying for verifying free speech full of lies? Right now the price for no verification is viewable on all news channels.

> Uh huh, and who decides what is a lie?

Well obviously that would be unelected “fact checkers” who aren’t held accountable for anything and suspiciously seem to find nearly everything said by people in one particular political party to be “pants on fire” lies.

> unelected “fact checkers”

You're right to point out the dangers of entrusting an unaccountable group with the responsibility of determining what is and isn't true, but I'm not sure that electing the fact checkers would improve their accuracy.

Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers.

> Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers.

Come on, I could easily remove context and/or provide a misleading "authoritative" interpretation to basically anything a Democrat says in order to brand it a lie. How new are you to this game?

This is an interesting point and my sibling comments are wrong: I'm sure the judiciary could provide that accountability, given new law. Even though I think Wikipedia is a failed project (because of it's own guidelines not being followed), it's actually got pretty good guidelines regarding verifiability and due weight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

I'm imagining the media could be structured upon some sort of protocol codified in law that would ensure those guidelines would be respected.

However the main thing that's necessary is probably instilling some sense of duty, honor and integrity in a large number of individuals. No idea how to go about that.

EDIT: in the USA the FCC actually had regulation with a similar intent in the near past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

> People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening.

I've suggested to @dang that he tries implementing a kind of experimental discussion mode like that right here on HN, where for certain types of topics he could enable this mode and see what the effect would be on the human mind.

I don't know all the particulars of what changes should be included in such a mode (would be a good topic for a discussion), but the main one I would include is an additional guideline something along the lines of "Please exert some effort in restricting your statements to the discussion of reasonably conclusive true facts about physical reality."

This way, when people inevitably succumb to mistaking the virtual reality in their mind (where one has supernatural powers like omniscience, the ability to read minds at scale, predict the future with precise accuracy, completely understand infinitely complex indeterminate/chaotic systems, etc) for physical reality (where we do not have these powers), such comments could be flagged and reviewed a few days later (when cooler heads prevail) in a group Post Incident Review process of some sort (maybe a zoom meeting), where we could examine our behavior from a more metaphysical perspective, the goal being to increase awareness of the fact that inaccurate beliefs about reality are not something that only members of our personal outgroups suffer from, but rather something we all suffer from. It is simply a consequence of the same base software we all run in our minds.

Unfortunately, this idea seems to be rather unpopular (shocking!) - so, the beatings will continue until morale improves (or some variation of that), or until this never ending process comes to its natural conclusion. Mother Nature is a cruel mistress.

https://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-morpholo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MHExbJGIQs

https://youtu.be/smX2UtdJFq8 (not recommended for filthy casuals)

Your proposed system seems mostly unaware that bias pervades all people and therefore all systems.

I don't think there's a way to system-design ourselves out of this situation.

That's the very point of such a system - to learn to recognize the symptoms of this problem, and how to rectify them. Also, note that bias is not a binary, it is a continuum, and our defaults can be overcome (see the third video linked above for an example).

> I don't think there's a way to system-design ourselves out of this situation.

I personally prefer to try and fail before declaring defeat. After all, how would one know if something isn't possible if no one ever tried it? If our ancestors had this attitude, we'd probably be doing something like having a pleasant ride in our horse and buggies rather than having pointless arguments with people we don't know who live half way around the world.

If our ancestors had this attitude, we might not have rage-builders being used daily by a third of living humans.

I don't believe all problems are unsolvable, but I've seen many systems fail because they do not take human nature into account.

Facebook and Twitter are probably the biggest such disasters I know about.

I realize your proposal's intent is to help people realize they have this problem.

I don't think it would do so very well.

> If our ancestors had this attitude, we might not have rage-builders being used daily by a third of living humans.

I agree. But we've got them now, so what will we do about it?

> I don't believe all problems are unsolvable, but I've seen many systems fail because they do not take human nature into account.

Me too. Let's say we did this and it didn't work - would this leave us in a worse state than before (excluding the development time involved)?

> I realize your proposal's intent is to help people realize they have this problem. I don't think it would do so very well.

You may be right! But how would we find out for sure?

Hypothetically: if the idea went to a vote (to try such an experiment here on HN), would you vote for or against, and why?

I'm not sure whether I'd vote for or against this proposal.

I probably would just ignore it entirely, if it was experimental and opt-in.

If it was required, I would probably stop using HN.

Despite trying to be a careful systems thinker and programmer, at my heart of hearts I am a mystic and an artist.

I suspect those parts of my worldview would be largely dismissed as drivel by people who are confident they know the truth and ideas that diverge from theirs as mine do aren't worth considering.

It's unpopular because it's naive. Nobody has the ability to prove everything to themselves and everyone else from first principles. Everyone takes shortcuts by repeating things they were told by others, thus "lying" is occasionally the 5-year old type of lying where someone just makes something up on the spot and tries to avoid looking guilty, but these are not the meaningful or common types of lies. In reality "lies" refer to the personal threshold someone has for edges in a sort of transitive PageRank over the graph of all claims made by all people.

A good way to see this is by looking at what news organisations call "fact checks". Almost always, these are simply repeating the claims of some random academics or government institutions, which are taken to be true by default. A lot of people really do assign a very high prior to "member of the establishment saying something makes it true", but a whole lot of other people do not. If the latter go and dig in and discover the underlying claim seems false, and start saying so, then the news orgs will claim it's "disinformation" and the others will say it's the "lying media" and yet nobody is literally making things up maliciously, even if a claim is objectively true or false.

This comment seems like a fine example of the very phenomenon I am trying to draw people's attention to.

I will try to explain...

> It's unpopular because it's naive.

You have no way of knowing whether this is naive.

> Nobody has the ability to prove everything to themselves and everyone else from first principles.

In no means whatsoever did I state this as a goal or requirement.

> Everyone takes shortcuts by repeating things they were told by others

Agreed. But my point is: people do not realize (in realtime) that they do this - and, this can have severe consequences.

> thus "lying" is occasionally the 5-year old type of lying where someone just makes something up on the spot and tries to avoid looking guilty, but these are not the meaningful or common types of lies.

I am not discussing lies (lying requires conscious intent) - I am discussing the mind's default inability to reliably distinguish between virtual reality and physical reality. This phenomenon can be observed in very high quantities on HN, but only in certain types of threads (culture war topics) - on other topics (computing, physics, etc), one will find very little flawed logic or assertions (relative to other social media sites).

Even if one doesn't think this is worth worrying about, it should at least be considered potentially interesting, considering the consequences of this phenomenon if it exists at scale. Take the climate change debate for example, or 'masks for covid' as a simpler scenario: what is the ACTUAL reason(s) our societies can't sort this shit out?

Should we care about such things, or should we not care? I'm getting very mixed messages on this from every social media site or organization I belong to. There seems to be general consensus that we should care (as a boolean) - but on the degree to which we should care, it seems like some people are opposed to caring too much (when it extends into thinking deeply and precisely, based on first principles (free of axioms and premises) and sound epistemology).

If you are debugging a complex system, would you use skills like precise observation, logic, and systems thinking, or would you just make a few wild guesses and throw up your hands in defeat when your guesses turn out to be ineffective?

> A good way to see this is by looking at what news organisations call "fact checks". Almost always, these are simply repeating the claims of some random academics or government institutions, which are taken to be true by default.

Agreed. This is an example of how 'that which is not true' in physical reality can become "true" in virtual reality.

> A lot of people really do assign a very high prior to "member of the establishment saying something makes it true", but a whole lot of other people do not.

Subconscious bayesian reasoning is often converted to binary when passed to the conscious (or so it seems).

> If the latter go and dig in and discover the underlying claim seems false, and start saying so, then the news orgs will claim it's "disinformation" and the others will say it's the "lying media" and yet nobody is literally making things up maliciously, even if a claim is objectively true or false.

Mostly agree, except for the "nobody is literally making things up maliciously" part - sometimes people actually do make things up with "malicious" intent.

>But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations

Where are these "genuine journalistic organizations" defined except in our own minds?

There is no journalist licence. There is no license to publish. You have a printer, and someone to buy what you print out? Congratulations! You're a journalist! In the U.S. anyway.

As it should be. I like to think of journalism as the softest science in that it has a lot of subtlety - hidden connections and dimensions - but ultimately the objective is to be able to infer the state of the world at some time - be it past, present of future - based on some partial information. And just like in regular science, collective knowledge can be leveraged and built upon if enough people take it upon themselves to do spot checks verifying the accuracy of accounts of events to which you might have an informational advantage. This can be via witnessing events first hand or have pre existing depth or via direct consumption of the raw primaries or just going on a dive.

Absolutely. I agree, and did not intend to imply ist should be otherwise. We must all be journalists in a sense, as each of us is to the societal macro-organism as a single sigmoidal node is to a neural network. It's why I think the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" is actually a severely underrated aspect of reasonable behavior as a human being.

I would say it's a matter of intent, and of capability.

Intent, in that the organization, and the people making it up, genuinely seek to find truth and publish it, rather than seeking to push one agenda or another regardless of the facts.

And capability, in that they can, in fact, do the research and possibly fieldwork necessary to get truths that are interesting enough to be worth publishing, as opposed to just reposting stories someone else researched, whatever their truth value.

Having the intent described above but not the capability makes you something of an aggregator. Having neither capability nor intent makes you, more or less, a partisan blogger.

Having the capability to be journalistic but the intent to push an agenda regardless of the truth makes you an incredibly dangerous propaganda outfit.

Given, but even that test is somewhat dangerous. Where is the line when the Government refuses the truth you are seeking and tries to shut you down for clearly being a propagandist even if you are on the right track?

I'm incredibly leery assigning a particular set of qualities to the essential journalist, even if by and large I do agree with the criteria you state.