Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.
Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?
Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid?
And I actually appreciate you all being here : )
But please distinguish between
- "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and
- secretly pushing an agenda.
And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb:
in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.
Certainly such a tool might be useful to someone analyzing disinformation campaigns, but it only goes so far.
If the intent with such plugins and other forms of human/AI moderation is merely identify the source of what looks like disinformation, you're going to disappointed to hear that those who are influenced by disinformation don't care what "the source" is. It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.
Dealing with this problem with "plugins", at best, is entering an infinite game of wack-a-mole. It's fundamentally not a technological problem.
This kind of stuff has always existed, and yes, now it's hopped-up on internet speed and naive countermeasures now need AI to keep up. But it's still qualitatively the same thing as it was in the 1930's. It requires a long game to battle it involving leadership, an educated populace and a government that isn't grossly polarized and dysfunctional.
Sadly, I don't think we're up to the challenge at least in the USA.
Interesting how you had to throw a right wing site in there with your underhanded attack. So you think the left is immune to this? Can you actually get through a CNN article without wanting to vomit?
With that one statement you lost me entirely.
But there's a special place in hell reserved for Fox News.
As bad as CNN can get with its cloying reductive stories, they at least try. Fox News is end-to-end garbage. Sorry.
> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.
> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.
4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception:
- Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information.
- Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the reporting.
- Be suspicious of human sources or sub-sources who have not been met with personally or for whom it is unclear how or from whom they obtained the information.
- Be suspicious of information that appears to be too easy to collect and is too perfect of a picture.
- Always look for material evidence (documents, reports, imagery) rather than relying exclusively upon what someone says.
- Look for a pattern where a source’s information has seemed correct and accurate initially, but then proven to be false.
- Generate and evaluate a full set of hypotheses at the outset of a task.
- Know the limitations as well as the capabilities of collection assets, sources, and potential deceivers.
This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...
[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf
It should. Under the name "media literacy".
Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.
One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information.
But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to creating a physical reality as a base to anchor upon. Not that this hasn't happened earlier, but it will become pervasive.
Would we be able to believe what we see then ?
Doesn’t everybody, at least in the US, go to school. By law?
Yeah if we did this the CIA would have a much harder time spreading bullshit. But yeah they'll still try with the "OMG you love Putin" To those in the media who actually exercise these recommendations. Maybe it's not even a totally baseless and disgusting slur every single time but it has happened so often now it's safe to assume anyone any good has been accused of being a Putin stooge at least once. Hilary accusing Bernie is my personal favourite. You may have others. Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Assange, Snowden. Zero evidence for any of it, sure, but it's still possible one or more of them is. No reason at all not to treat that with total contempt given that each has presented evidence opposing in the interests of national security state propaganda and there's none at all for these Putin stooge smears.
Feel free to keep loathing Putin, I do, I just don't see him under the bed and switch my brain off the instant he's invoked. If you haven't seen that the CIA, NSA have real issues of criminality that is in need of serious reform, and many inside will eagerly break the law to avoid it consider what would get you to change your mind on that?
The corruption inside is a far, far greater threat to the USA than Putin (or Osama bin L. or Saddam or.. the next objectively evil bogeyman) could be in their wildest fantasies. Failure to reform is incredibly dangerous and weakens defenses massively.
Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?
A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason.
In other words, I usually tune it out because of that and instead go look for primary sources on whatever is making the news, instead, and even when I read the articles, I care only about the sources and whether I can verify them. I simply skip all the sections that are opinion.
Where on earth do you get this from?
In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.
Complete and utter lap dogs.
From local cops to the CIA comparing the same information from multiple sources is SOP for everyone who deals with unreliable information.
Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...
So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.
I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.
I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.
That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.
Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?
On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.
My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."
I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.
That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.
> fake consensus that can become very misleading
It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580
Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.
I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.
Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.
Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.
Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.
It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....
Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.
Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.
That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.
On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.
I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.
I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.
Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.
The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.
He speculated that it could have been a bioweapon that was accidentally or deliberately released. You and I can speculate on twitter but a US senator should keep his trap shut on social media.
I mean, he lists four options, and identifies natural release as the most likely and intentional release as very unlikely. And it's expressed clearly, in full sentences.
By the standards of republican politicians on twitter, that's actually pretty good.
This same thing happened to Sarah Palin with the 'I can see Russia from my house' phrase, which she never said. It was part of a comedy sketch, yet it was used to attack her. It is absolutely ridiculous. No one is interested anymore in what is said, just what they think someone 'like that' would say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg
The fine people on both sides was truly as horrific as it was made out to be. They had a torchlight nazi parade where they chanted jews will not replace us and they murdered people.
Here is a pic of people flying as they were hit by a car.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/2017_Charlott...
On February 20th 2020 Tom Cotton speculated that it was possible that China deliberately released the virus or that it could be a bioweapon that had been released.
https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866
This isn't a hypothesis a US senator should throw out on twitter because the right wing completely ignored the speculative nature or any qualifications and completely ran with Tom says they Chinese attacked us.
"I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. "
Trump knows full well that this is a lie. No one was there because Lee was so great of a general and they love military tactics. They were there because he fought to protect slavery. There was absolutely no "both sides" about anything. In context he's still saying protestors were as much to blame as the counter protest and the counter protest had as much validity to their complaint as the protestors. These is exactly what everyone took his meaning and all the context and clarification make it very clear that he meant murdering racists are the same as peaceful protestors against violence.
The guys holding tiki torches were definitely white supremacists.
Most protesters who are in favor of preserving Confederate monuments aren't doing so because of slavery. I don't agree with them but I grew up around them in Virginia and it's much more complicated than "derp they love slavery derp".
The confidence you possess in your ability to read people's minds is likely unfounded since I've never met any human being who can successfully read others minds.
The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.
But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.
Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.
There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.
After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.
18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.
The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.
You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.
I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.
First, pointing out that other pandemics have happened absent lab accidents doesn't negate all the evidence pointing in that direction this time. As far as evidence and probability goes (with regard to the potential evolutionary paths the virus would have had to have taken in the wild), the lab leak hypothesis is very strong. The simplest answer is that it leaked from the lab a few miles away studying this exact family of viruses.
Second, the parent wasn't saying anything about whether or not Trump was twisting the truth or being dramatic. His whole point is that the discussion was able to be hijacked by the simple act of a divisive figure talking about it. It's fine if people dismiss Trump (the smart thing to do honestly), but allowing that to bias you in the opposite direction without any evidence is making the exact same mistake he did.
except his CDC head claimed after the new administration took over that Trump's administration did have additional classified evidence that made it more likely. It is extremely likely that the intelligence community knew of the chinese researchers who had gone to the hospital (and maybe more) way before it was released to the public. By the time these facts are made public, they have been researched and assigned a high level of confidence.
I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.