I get where you're going here, and I don't totally disagree, but that's not "just" what experts are. Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.
It's good to be skeptical, and it's important to understand that experts have bias too, but there's a difference between someone who has passively consumed information in a biased manner and an expert who has dedicated real research to arrive at their viewpoint. Being able to consume and be critical of information from biased experts while still benefiting from and being enriched by their knowledge and expertise (instead of disregarding it because you disagree) is I think the crown jewel of "critical thinking".
One thing to note though is that the less mature a field is, the more gaps there will be an expert's knowledge/models. Doctors in the 1940s were regarded as medical experts, and yet many were actively promoting cigarettes. History is littered with "experts" whose expertise was outrageously wrong or misguided in hindsight.
So I say people should judge experts by the maturity of their field and in the context they are providing expertise on.
A civil engineer is giving expertise on whether a building will collapse or not? You'll likely get extremely reliable expertise you can count on.
A doctor is promoting a glass of wine a day for health reasons? Take it with a grain of salt.
The other issue is the lack of education and basic critical thinking among a high proportion of population so you find yourself in a world full of conspiracy theories and fake information. For some reasons I thought this issue can be found only in 3rd world countries but covid openned my eyes...
in fact, the nominative 'expert' is a political injection, practically begging for appeal to authority to shut down critical thinking. expertise has little correlation to trustworthiness, given that it typically gets overwhelmed by the politically-interwined 'esteem'.
there is no shortcut to doing the hard work of triangulating the best information out of many biased opinions, including so-called 'experts'[0]. this is true of news, reviews, and commentary of all sorts.
[0]: similarly noted in a different context here, along with it's grandparent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29678221
Nutritionists and fitness coaches are much more willing to speculate in my experience, with the caveat that they may not have the same education as a scientist as a physician does.
Also that much caffeine really sucks.
Part of the problem is that non-experts tend to summarize expert information in ways that alter or omit crucial points, and then people are disappointed when the crib notes version tends to be inaccurate.
https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/
And yet the medical experts still get it wrong by oversimplifying the issue and making dietary recommendations based on quantity.
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/c...
A doctor is promoting vaccinating your child from COVID?. Should that also be taken with a grain of salt?
What about measles?
How do you draw the line?
How do you help others - suspicious of authority, and being actively manipulated in a culture war to distrust anything a "progressive" tells them - to draw the line?
I think it's impossible. The only way is to say that "Doctors are experts. They have been wrong before and they will be wrong again. Experts doesn't mean getting things 100% right. But it definitely means getting things more right than you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as new information develops, the advice will shift".
By the way both sides in the culture war believe this. FOX News finds their own experts. They find the 0.1% scientists that don't believe in climate change and give them 60% of the airtime. But they still appeal to experts.
People you disagree with aren't the only ones being manipulated.
The Data: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/7hjdap/the_last_pr...
Again, maturity of the thing the expertise revolves around is important here.
Since covid has been around less than 2 years and child-approved covid vaccines have been around for less than 1 year, I'd take a recommendation to vaccinate my kid against covid with a grain of salt. Especially since covid itself does not appear to impact children the same way it does adults (<0.03% of covid deaths have been children, etc.). Since covid is a highly politicized topic at the moment it's hard to tell if the doctor is recommending the vaccine because he actually feels it's beneficial vs. recommending the vaccine because despite feeling like it's not terribly beneficial, he's feeling pressure from governments to push the vaccine because they want to get kids back into schools.
Measles vaccines have been around over 50 years, have a proven utility and track record, and are not currently politicized. Plus measles is way more deadly to kids than covid, so in that case it's more cut and dry.
So my philosophy is to take covid-related advice with a grain of salt until the expertise around it is more mature. I think in 5 years we will have a much better idea of how necessary child covid vaccines really are (as well as how necessary cloth masks really are, etc.).
By the way, when I say "take with a grain of salt", I don't mean "don't give your kid the covid vaccine". I mean "Probably still give the kid covid vaccine but reserve the right to harbor doubts that it's actually necessary and quietly suspect the current political climate is putting pressure on hospitals to push the vaccine regardless of the actual merits of the vaccine"
You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100% trust in a person. There are endless examples in human history as to why this is dangerous. There are very few as to why this is good. "Just trust me" is generally regarded as something said by a person you should not trust, and for good reason.
> How do you draw the line?
You do your best to evaluate the information on your own and find sources you trust. The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes political.
Not at all. Placing provisional trust in am expert about a specific opinion you are aware may change in the future is completely different from "giving up all agency" or "placing 100% trust in a person. Nothing in that advice tells you not to check the opinions of a few different experts to be sure you aren't being misled.
> The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes political.
It's not that hard. You find experts who seem to do a good job of acknowledging nuance and don't seem to be trying to make their facts fit a narrative.
What you don't do is trust someone because what they say on completely different topics matches what you believe or trust someone because they consistently give you the answers you want to hear. Doing either of those is worse than just blindly trusting experts.
And those sources will consist of...who? Perhaps, people who have spent time and effort learning about the topic, a.k.a. "the experts"?
A parallel to this is something I saw in Italy where a number of people complain that "all the politicians are corrupt". This provides cover for the really rotten politicians, because it puts the ones shoveling money to their cronies in the same category as the basically honest guy who's trying his best to actually do something positive for his constituents.
So are pens. Do you have any idea of the magnitude of horrors that have been committed by the stroke of a pen? Should we ban pens?
While there are bad actors, consensus is generally going to guide you closer to the truth than fringe experts. What does the community of experts who have studied this say about it? Is it something generally accepted by the experts or is it something that most experts disagree with?
It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will succumb to bias. Climate change is the poster child here. Where experts disagree isn't that it is happening and caused by man, they disagree about the degree that it will be a problem (With all of them agreeing it's a major issue). Yet, I've often seen it claimed that those experts are all biased and this fringe expert funded by Koch research is really the one to be trusted (which, shocker, finds we should be burning MORE fossil fuels!)
I noticed a map of obesity overlaps very well with a map of diabetes. high alcohol consumption mapped very well with the areas the prior map didnt correlate. in other words, in areas where obesity was not correlated with diabetes, there was high alcohol consumption. paper worthy or worth looking into? no. I lied to a different section of the group and said these were areas of increased correlation, and it wasn't alcohol but soda consumption. They immediately wanted to seek grants to write papers.
You can see how this leads to junk science. if you ignore things that dont fit your political agenda and only research things that fit your agenda, that's junk science. it gets worse because when the data doesnt suggest the political agenda pushed, they try to 'account' for other factors or re-run the study in a different way until it says what they wanted it to say. worse case, it doesnt get published.
The experts are not to be trusted.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.asp...
What else could they be wrong about today? Often when you really dig into consensus statements you find that they're based on a handful of old studies which don't really meet modern evidence based medicine criteria.
Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?
What about the expert consensus that azithromycin is an effective treatment against (most strains of) streptococcus? Is that consensus wrong?
You are correct, expert consensus will be wrong at times and it will take a fairly large push and evidence to change course. However, for every example of the experts "getting it wrong" there are 100s if not 1000s where you are better off following the consensus. Further, as time goes on, the process of developing consensus improves itself. It looks for faults that lead to bad conclusions and corrects for those faults in future studies.
It is a truth that experts and their consensuses will be wrong. However, if I follow and accept what a strong expert consensus says about something in that field of study 99% or even 99.99% of the time, they will be right. Or said another way, if you make the claim that "This expert consensus is wrong" You'll be right 0.01% of the time and wrong 99.99% of the time. Unless you are an expert in that field of study and you have a bunch of very strong research backing the claim, you've got no footing to really go against the consensus.
My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.
Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.
> My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.
All fair points that I don't really disagree with.
> Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.
I don't think it's quiet as binary. I agree, they should limit recommendations based on the data and be very open when "the data is limited and more information could change our recommendation".
But I don't think that means they need to be silent when data is limited, just careful with communication.
Health experts are in the worst position for this sort of thing. In a pandemic situation, data will simply be limited and action required to prevent lose of life. You can't just sit back and do nothing.
But, I'd agree that you need to be very open and frank about why you are taking actions and how confident you are that the actions you are taking will be effective. COVID hasn't been handled perfectly in that regard, but it could be worse.
As for trust and credibility, I think a major social issue we have is that we are quick to distrust experts over being wrong or mistepping on any given issue but for some reason we are extremely forgiving of religious leaders and politicians that repeat platitudes we agree with. I'm not advocating for blind trust in experts, but I wish it wasn't so reactionary, where any wrong statement causes people to lose all trust in expert credibility. That's not something I could control anyways.
"First, do no harm" is a fundamental principle of medical ethics. Unfortunately iatrogenic harm from over treatment is still a serious cause of injuries and deaths. The default should always be to do nothing unless there is clear and reliable evidence to support intervention. That applies equally to pandemics as to other situations.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-building-a-...
I understand that politicians might sometimes have to take rapid actions based on political factors. But don't deceive the populace by falsely claiming those actions are supported by scientific consensus.
Saying correctness approaches 0 because knowledge is effectively infinite would be like saying our ability to do math correctly is 0 because there are an infinite amount of numbers. Or, that our ability to write correct software is 0 because there are infinite possible programs.
Scientific consensus correctness is calculated as true assertions / all assertions.
If we stopped making assertions, today, the scientific consensus correctness would be fixed at whatever level it is at. The amount of knowledge that hasn't been studied has no bearing on the correctness of scientific consensus. That's a number that is finite with a denominator squarely fixed by the number of assertions that happen as human knowledge expands.
The assertion 1 + 1 = 2 will always be true. If that was the only assertion the scientific community ever made and had consensus over then they'd be at 100% correctness. It doesn't matter that you can also calculate 1 + 2, or 3 + 5, or an infinite number of numerical combinations. The denominator is the assertions, not the unasserted assertions. It doesn't matter that knowledge is "fractile" or whatever. Because, assertions by the scientific community are pretty much always couched as "Given the current data, this model fits best". Newtonian physics isn't "incorrect" it's incomplete. This is the same for most knowledge with that "fractile" understanding.
The only way you approach 0 is if our fundamental understanding of reality is completely fundamentally flawed, but then, that'd be an unknowable knowledge.
scientific consensus has no hope of outrunning even what humans in general know, let alone every scientific conjecture ever made, most of which aren't disproven, but rather merely discarded. and all that is a tiny speck next to everything that's within reach of human knowledge, which is miniscule next to everything that could ever be known but is forever beyond our reach. it really does approach 0 at the limit.
Further, the scenario of this entire thread is about current and future scientific consensus, not past consensus. The fact that protoscience said that that you need to balance the 4 humors to cure illness does not affect current scientific consensus which soundly rejects that notion.
The number of assertions we have scientific consensus on is finite. The number of those assertions which are true is a finite number. The infinite nature of knowledge does not change that ratio because, again, we aren't making assertions about everything that is knowable.
The entire point of this conversation is "What is more likely true, what the experts say or something else?". You are making the claim that because scientists don't know what every atom in the sun is doing, they can't correctly say that the sun will rise in the morning. Because, their knowledge of the sun is an infinitesimally small percentage of everything there is to know about the sun.
My point is, scientists aren't making assertions about what every quark in the sun will do. They aren't making assertions about the temperature of every square inch of the sun. The assertions they are making are far more broad and, shocker, likely 90+% true. Which circles back to my main point. If an expert tells you "The surface of the sun is roughly 6000C" That's a correct statement.
If you aren't going to address this in your next comment then don't bother because I'm done with this. You are being purposefully obtuse.
That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.
The issue isn't that experts are wrong or change their stance when the data changes. That isn't a problem and is exactly how things should work.
The issue is when politicians and leaders treat "expert opinion" as settled truth. Our decisions and policies need to be crafted knowing that experts are wrong and the situation changes when the data changes. Instead, politicians and leaders hold up expert opinion as settled and let the blame fall on the scientists, researchers, etc. when they "miss". If their work was not co-opted by politicians there would be no issue.
No, that’s only how things work when you are looking for a pretense to ignore expert advice.
Most of the reasons for distrust I've seen have basically boiled down to "I don't like what the expert is saying" or "They were wrong once, obviously all experts are wrong about everything".
Obviously knowing somebody personally makes this much easier.
WRT Covid, yes that advice was wrong and has been abandoned as Covid isn’t spread by surface transmission.
I wholly trust science that independently replicates and the fact that it's missing from the process means much of what we see is less than wholly trustworthy.
Certainly, a lot of the social sciences and "soft" sciences have a fair bit of replication/data problems. That said, the biomedical, environmental, geologic, and chemical sciences by and large have really solid data and repeats of that data. The areas of sciences we have a harder time controlling for are those where it'd be unethical to get better data and examples (nutritional science, for example).
There are far too many fields of study to lump all science into the same bucket and call it all untrustworthy.
A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal. When, in fact, some studies are far better than others and carry a much larger weight of truth.
But FB, and other platforms, treat them as if they are when making their decisions on what to censor. FB even trusts so called "independent fact checkers," who don't even claim to be scientists and write mostly on political topics, to act as arbiters of truth.
> A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal.
And it's these journalists that FB is relying on for its determination of fact, not the actual scientists.
It's happened before, especially when a select few command the majority of the field's grants/publications. If you are interested in how this could happen, here's an example of where basically the entirety of the Alzheimer's disease research field of study succumbed to bias:
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...
as well as the HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225
They may not be doing a particularly good job un-distorting it, but it's not a choice between pure and free exchange of information and censorship. It is between whether Facebook is going to manipulate in both directions -- promoting and taking down -- or just one.
(Note that I don't think either of these choices are particularly good. I would prefer that Facebook did neither.)
And stop dissembling. For instance, Fauci's early statements on mask-wearing were calculated to preserve the supply of N95 masks for medical personnel. However laudable the intent, it betrays what I imagine is an endemic world-view that the masses must be manipulated, rather than dealt with honestly.
This morning, an NPR report about the new CDC quarantine guidelines acknowledged criticisms/allegations of corporate lobbying for the policy change and internal fears of staffing for critical services, which was followed-up by a "follow the science" platitude.
Which camp does the fact checker fall into?
Are we still talking about Facebook fact checking experts?
So the percentage of experts who spend real research on a question appears to be less than 100.
For sure, but that's not at all how fact checking is implemented today. Most of the critique is related to the silencing, discrediting and deplatforming of reporters and professionals (i.e. experts by your definition) that express a different interpretation or selection of data. Even if it was enforced through gate-keeping by merit, it would still be massively subject to bias and political capture.
It's abundantly clear that fact-checking is at best using Western authority consensus, which is much more narrow than even scientific consensus, which itself has a majorly flawed track record in recent history.
What fact checking is effectively doing is treating information, debate and ideas as a form of hazardous material, too dangerous to be freely exchanged, unless certified by chain of custody through the supply chain of truths. Independently of the do-gooders' commandable intents, the result is predictably Orwellian. The systems, processes and bureaucracies for policing speech are rapidly expanding during this pandemic, see e.g. the Trusted News Initiative[1] and check their partner list. (There are of course countless other moving pieces.)
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...
People do not disbelieve experts because they think they are experts themselves. They disbelieve experts because the argument today is: I am an expert, I am right, if you disagree with me you are likely a danger to other people.
What has changed is the attitude of "experts" to other people. And I say "experts" because it is also increasingly common for people who have expertise in one subject to claim that they have expertise in another subject, and use that authority to elevate their claims beyond contention.
It isn't about scepticism or some kind of re-interpretation of scientific truth...it is one group of people attempting to use their authority to force through their view of what society should be like. If you want to see what the looks like, China is led by "experts"...it isn't pretty. I think Covid has brought this to the fore because you have scientific "experts" ruling on societal and political issues, not because people necessarily disbelieve those claims (ofc, experts and politicians are very clear to make this unclear...they want you to believe that the people who oppose them are lunatics, they aren't, they are rarely people who deny Covid is occurring or deny vaccines work...they just have different political views which suggest different solutions to those problems...there are no experts in politics, that is why we have voting, "experts" today are attempting to shut down debate, shut down politics, and would shut down voting if given the chance).
Also, another big issue is that experts undermine themselves. I can only speak to what is happening in the UK but experts here have made predictions that were fairly consistently untrue - https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios - people did not disbelieve these predictions at the start, they disbelieve them now because the evidence is clear: the predictions are consistently wrong, and consistently used to justify a political decision that the "experts" want (one that has massive externalities in areas that the "experts" don't know about...paragraph 3 again). This happens, no-one can predict the future, no-one can predict the course of a pandemic 100%...but the problem is that the "experts" are saying: we can predict this, we are correct all the time...again, this is something totally different. Again, what has changed is the experts, not the people.
Poor form fellows, very poor form.
Talking about trying to find an "absolute truth" is disingenuous. Yeah, we absolutely know 1+1=2, but it's impossible to absolutely know how a stock will perform. Often times, a situation doesn't call for finding "the real" or "absolute" truth, but coming to a conclusion using only the best info you have on hand at the moment.
In most cases, you can find the best info. You have to know how to find it though, how to weigh one source against another. It's like the old proverb about teaching a man to fish rather than giving them a fish. Learning "how to fish" is something you're taught in school, but then again, there are those in power that are making it harder to get a proper education. That's something to be wary of. They aren't just taking our fish, but our ability to fish.
Facts come from studies that have been published which are disproven four years later when finally repeated.
So for a couple years at least, it's always clear what the truth is.
Don't get me wrong, it's important you know the real truth, but that isn't often the one you gain much from promoting.
Promoting actual truth can be rather damming at times.
You mean belief, which causes major problems when conflated with truth.
Belief is useful for planning, but needs a separate static truth to have predictive value.
Anyway, there's no other definition of "truth" that isn't a mockery of the word as used. In practice you work with the closest you can get at the moment, but you don't redefine your terms down to match.
I don’t plan to exit my apartment through the window because I know there’s no relative truth of what will happen.
Experts are usually correct. I have no idea why you would think otherwise. Now, experts in one area often misapply that authority to others where they are not expert, but within their domain they are most often right. And I have yet to see that not be the case.
It’s really challenging for me to speak in a way that’s unarguable. For example, instead of saying “COVID is now…”, saying “I read an article that says COVID is now…”.
The first sentence is arguable, the second is unarguable because it’s my personal experience. How often do you read articles or reporting that state unarguable truths?
Even a slight tweak from “COVID cases are spiking…” to “The NY Department of Health released data showing an X% increase in reported COVID cases statewide” makes a lot of difference in how I perceive the potential bias or truthiness of the content I’m reading.
This happened a lot with the Jan 6th event. Some even proudly labeling it an insurrection when they made statements I noticed. It was like the language choice was used fearlessly.
The Covid headlines as you mention are another huge one. Ive heard surge so many times and it’s been completely remade into an indication of a massive spike no matter the real context.
Even if the cases really surging, I’ve always hated the use of words that take the ability away from the reader to tell for themselves what happened.
A similar issue is in finding raw video of events, like rittenhouse shooting. So much of the results were subjectively selected clips w the news anchors speaking over it. I don’t want to be told what happened, I want the raw facts.
One issue driving it is the abandonment of personal responsibility for any aspect of our lives. Americans have it constantly drilled into them to expect authority figures to take the lead on providing our basic necessities, handling workplace disputes, obtaining medical care, etc., why should we be surprised that they’ve lost the ability to think for themselves?
This is an absurd and false statement, and is a perfect summation of why so much mis/disinformation floats around and is so popular in today's online world.
Experts do indeed have their own inherent biases. This part is a glib truism because experts are people, and all people have biases which both consciously and unconsciously influence their decision making.
But that is not "just" what experts are. Experts are people who have, by definition, expertise in a given subject matter. Unless you too are an equal expert in a given topic, experts--once again by definition--know more than you do in that field.
It doesn't mean you need to take what they say as gospel, so to speak, but it does mean that when the choice is to listen to 'random person on the internet' versus 'someone who has studied something for years and has made valued contributions to the field', the two-despite both having biases-are not on equal footing.
And when experts disagree, it is informed disagreement, not at all like random people on the internet.
You are an idiot. An argument stands on it's own. Who presents arguments is wholly immaterial.
Obviously anyone remotely rational is going to go with b). Why? Because they trust that the people there are more likely to better care for you than a random person on the street. And why is that? Because they are experts.
This obviously isnt to say all experts are not knowledgeable, but theres plenty who are not and often they are in charge. Thats why taking their opinion as ultimate truth without question is dangerous.
> Thats why taking their opinion as ultimate truth without question is dangerous.
Agree. Which is why I explicitly stated:
> It doesn't mean you need to take what they say as gospel, so to speak, but it does mean that when the choice is to listen to 'random person on the internet' versus 'someone who has studied something for years and has made valued contributions to the field', the two-despite both having biases-are not on equal footing.
I'm sorry that it sounds like you have a shitty doctor. The solution is to find a better one, not to renounce doctors.
As you say, most of the time these aren't "facts", but usually opinions or hypotheses based on a subject interruption of some data. The truth is even if 99% of the evidence we have today suggests masks work, this doesn't mean masks work, just that it's very likely they do assuming there isn't some bias in the research. The reason I mention bias is because it's simply true that in the past research on things like contentious subjects like climate change, smoking and various diets have been biased by corporate interest.
I think the problem we have with misinformation today is less that people sometimes believe the wrong things, but they believe the wrong things with high levels of conviction and passion. The first step in the solution to misinformation in my opinion should be to promote an attitude similar to yours -- one of general scepticism and an openness to new information and beliefs.
Here are some studies that probably need to be done more carefully because they conclude "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."[1]. So what's wrong with questioning and asking for more to be done?
[0] https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/15/stanford-faculty-smear-...
Kinda ironic, given the topic.
Who fact checks the fact checkers?
There has also never really been a period in western civilisation where the news media wasn’t heavily controlled and fact checked by powerful editors.
The real issue isn’t fact checkers, it’s that Facebook isn’t held accountable.
If we want a functioning democracy, we need to stop giving major corporations a pass because the manipulation that happens on their platforms is created and run by users. That’s not how we treated News Papers and it’s not how we should treat Social Networks. If Facebook has really been a knowing participant in genocides, then Mark Zuckerberg belongs in the Haag as far as I am concerned.
If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I mean yes it is false but as Americans we are suppost to have free speech when we don't.
Good thing nothing that happens on Facebook ever spills over into other countries.
On a non-sarcastic note, I find it interesting that you didn't engage at all with the comment about Facebook and genocides. It's easy to sit in an ivory tower and play philosopher on topics of corporate censorship like this. What's less interesting, but far more useful, is evaluating whether Facebook should do more to moderate when their platform is actively used to orchestrate genocides in several separate places on earth.
Your first amendment right to free speech is a limited freedom from the government stating that the government cannot stifle or compel your speech. Facebook is not (yet) the government, so the 1A protections do not apply to Facebook. After all, if Facebook were forced to host content they didn't want to host, that would be considered compelled speech.
I would argue that if a post is verifiably, unequivocally false it is right to flag it as such. Maybe limit its reach in "discovery" platforms but still show it to followers/friends. This is a very, very small percentage of posts (think: "the earth is flat," not "do vaccines really work?"). These warnings should link to reputable, peer-reviewed research as a primary source and a reputable secondary source for those who don't want to read the research paper.
The incentive to move the bar lower will lead to constant lowering of the bar until we're back to where we are today.
I'm not native english speaker, but calling fact checkers more damaging to society then: fox news, qanon, american nazism, evangelical believes, mormons, all christianity, school schootings, obama being war criminal for drone bombing iraqis, climate catastrphy and propping up islam regimes in saudi arabia etc, war on public transport by motor-lobby, end of democracy in us
I could go for hours, I smell right wing bullshit from miles, or OP is autistic
I'd go a step further and assert that these "fact checkers" play fast and loose with the definition of words and the meaning of language. Here is the absolute best example I can think of:
"Did a ‘Convicted Terrorist’ Sit on the Board of a BLM Funding Body?"[1]
What's True: Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined: In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
Edit: I apologize for the unwieldy formatting of this post. But I keep finding more disturbing content from the snopes article that I must share.
>"In her memoir, Rosenberg wrote of her 1984 arrest in New Jersey that “there was no immediate, specific plan to use the explosives” with which she and Blunk were caught. ..."
>"Earlier in her book, Rosenberg indicated that she was comfortable, at least at one point in time, with bombing government buildings:"
>"proven record of using bomb attacks to influence the wider American public and advance their cause. As such, a supportable (though not definitive) case exists for claiming that the crimes of which Rosenberg was convicted in 1985 were indeed acts of domestic terrorism."
The author(s) are making every rhetorical excuse they can imagine. Yes, she admits in her book she was comfortable with using them. Yes, she did technically get caught with them. But you must keep in mind that there were no immediate plans to use them.
>"In any event, despite the existence of a definition of domestic terrorism in federal law, a discrete criminal offense of domestic terrorism does not exist, and did not exist in the 1980s. As a result, even if Rosenberg’s activities perfectly met the definition of domestic terrorism currently set out in federal law, and even if that definition existed in the 1980s, she could not have been charged with, tried for and convicted of domestic terrorism as such."
Look, dear reader, even if everything you learned about this situation is screaming "domestic terrorist", you HAVE to understand that by definition, she can't be one because of all the technicalities I have shown you. Case closed.
Whether a person was convicted of a specific crime is a fact. It's true or false. People can disagree about whether the trial was fair, the law was just, etc... but there is an objective truth as to whether the conviction occurred or it did not.
The Snopes article lists the crimes Rosenberg was convicted of, which do not include "terrorism" or anything equivalent to that. She was convicted of multiple offenses involving weapons possession and identity fraud. The article goes on to list numerous other offenses involving a prison break, several armed robberies, and planting bombs for which she was charged, but not tried or convicted. It is therefore correct to say that she is not a convicted terrorist.
The article provides more than enough background for a reader to form the opinion that her activities constituted terrorism, and indeed that is my opinion.
Choosing what statements or what formulations of statements to fact check is also a part of the bias. People just read the headline, if they read "fact check, X was not a 'convicted terrorist'", they will read that as "X was not a terrorist", the fact checkers knows this and uses that to their advantage when picking the sentence to check and the verdict that will follow.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/
[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/
Sure it will. You can flag it as false, and make sure nobody can see the posts.
It seems to me the answer to this dilemma is to replace her on the board of directors. Scores of other CEO's and board members have been dismissed or asked to resign over far less. I'm no PR expert, but her background and connections are certainly eyebrow raising, despite all the attempts to hand-waive or dismiss them. Surely they have a large pool of talent from which to draw a replacement with a less problematic history?
Or, much more reasonably, that it is an organization unconcerned with violence affecting innocent people.
There is no conviction of terrorism on her criminal record
Does that mean that I will be labeled as a spreader of fake news if I call Mohamed Atta [2] a terrorist?
What about pejorative adjectives describing conduct that isn't actually illegal, such as shouting at restaurant wait staff over perceived mistakes? Am I allowed to call that person a "jerk"?
It would be plainly ridiculous to insist that we can only apply adjectives upon conviction by a criminal court. That's not how adjectives work.
Can you see why people object to this kind of legalistic thinking? If you follow the reasoning that only a conviction of terrorism qualifies one as a terrorist, what implications follow from that?
Which circles back to my original point that the fact-checkers often resort to manipulating language in order to arrive at the verdicts they present. I find this kind of misdirection incredibly dishonest - both intellectually and ethically.
e.g. lots of people have called Kyle Rittenhouse a 'terrorist'. Say he had been convicted on one of the charges against him - would it be fair to call him a 'convicted terrorist' just because some people feel he is a terrorist, and he was convicted of something? Clearly not.
"Rosenberg is a convicted criminal who planned terrorist acts" is a far more defensible claim, so why not just say that?
In your view, do adjectives not matter for facticity, only nouns? Could we fairly call Osama bin Laden a Russian terrorist or a female terrorist?
All the "fact checkers" were brought in to discuss how there are other, larger threats to birds, like cats and buildings etc.
Clearly this wasn't a "truth finding fact check", but more of a "don't let Trump score any points" fact check.
Fact checkers know exactly what a fact is rather they don't like people to know the truth, they instead want to push information that benefits them in some way.
"The Fact Checkers (TM)(R)"... what are they in this case? They are employees working at the behest of the owner of the property of which you are a guest.
Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials be allowed to use social media sites for official business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up? Yeah.
I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the company than "no more moderation".
But compelling speech is also a violation of free speech. If you demanded that I post your article on my personal homepage, I'd politely tell you to bugger off. And if you insisted that I should have to do so, I'd consider you an enemy of free speech.
Apparently you don't feel the same way about FB.
But where does that line get drawn?
And what, exactly, is FB allowed/not allowed to censor (and don't be glib, the answer "nothing" is functionally equivalent to "make FB 4chan" and I think you'll find fewer than 1% of the population that is radical enough to think that would improve things)?
Who decides?
We don't have good answers to those questions. They're fundamentally questions about who gets enormous amounts of political/economic power. Power corrupts. But even if we did have good answers to these impossible zero-sum questions, we still wouldn't really have a decent solution to the underlying problem.
The problem with platforms like FB isn't primarily caused by the content of any particular speech and so can't be solved by censorship of FB users or of FB itself. The wariness about FB is reasonable, but the instinct to solve the problem by censoring FB itself is all wrong. It grounds out a massive political struggle and doesn't even solve the underlying problem.
There are other ways of pressuring them at different levels as well: demanding moderation transparency, regulating them as we do for utilities, supporting competitive alternatives which respect free expression, etc.
The Wikipedia article quotes someone in the Kennedy administration as saying: "Our massive strategy [in the early 1960s] was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."
So it kinda seems that weaponization of complaints was part of the issue.
Do you happen to have any pointers or comments on Reagan administrations reasoning, and the efforts by liberals to restore the doctrine?
How would you feel if I told you that you must put a campaign placard in your front yard, and that if you don't like it you may always put a post-it note under the sign expressing your discontent?
Here:
>>> They should be allowed to post "this is false" all they want in the comment box, just like everyone else is. They just shouldn't get special powers, like blurring out your article and putting their comment directly over it, instead of in the comment section.
The ability to decide which pixels to serve from a server you own isn't a "special power". It's free speech.
Ignoring the extreme irony of people supposedly on the left arguing to protect corporate rights and personhood (of an absurdly wealthy megacorporation, no less), this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom of association." once used by bigots. In both cases, yes, it is but both are public accommodations and it serves the greater good to require that they serve everyone equally.
To be blunt, your comment is presumptive, confrontational, and unpleasant for no reason. My point of view on this is obviously more nuanced than your lazy straw-man.
In fact, I address this whole set of issues very explicitly in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726829
> to protect corporate rights and personhood
In the comment I posted, had you bothered to read the whole thread instead of jumping down my throat, I say:
>> Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials be allowed to use social media sites for official business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up? Yeah.
>> I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the company than "no more moderation".
Far from advocating protecting corporate rights, I'm arguing for the dissolution of legal protections which are much more valuable to Facebook than its free speech protections.
Moving on to the rest of your comment, you say:
> this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom of association
Yawn. Who cares? This is not an instructive or insightful comment. It's a meme that has been repeated on every thread on this topic for close to a decade at this point. It doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of the problem.
There are many ways to check corporate power. Compelling or restricting speech is not the right tool in the case of Facebook. Censoring Facebook as an intervention is too weak, too susceptible to abuse, and doesn't address the underlying problem.
Go look at actual attempts to implement something like what you suggest. E.g., Hawley's legislation which would allow Facebook moderation powers (which is, frankly, necessary for any community with higher utility than 4chan). But which would also have a panel of political appointees decide, based on Facebook's moderation behavior, whether it should keep Section 230. Surely you see how that is ripe for abuse, right?
Again. The problems with Facebook can't be solved by censorship, either of Facebook users or of Facebook itself. That is not a defense of Facebook. Quite the opposite.
Speaking of irony... I'm literally the only person in this thread advocating for a solution to the Facebook problem that doesn't involve censoring someone/something.
The inability to censor others in a public forum isn't censorship. They can still post as much as the next person.
The problem is that Facebook used fact checkers to censor others.
The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain. Therefore, be open to new ideas, but slow to accept anything as absolute truth. Those in power push narratives. Conflicts of interest make data questionable. "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases. And often we simply learn new things.
Therefore, I can think of very few things more damaging to society and free speech than "fact checkers". Almost always I find that their "facts" are nothing more than the "opinions" of the most powerful and influential group at the time, and are usually entangled with politics. In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them, and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth.