I don't think this is a problem of fake narratives versus reasonable people. It's that we all use narratives to understand the world, and those narratives often conflict. And if our goal is peace, it's more important to understand these differences than it is to adjudicated between them.

This is particularly true if some of these perspectives are actually pretty worrying. Because if we just write folks off as crazy or brainwashed, we don't really understand them. It's perfectly fine to still think other people are wrong, though.

Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional media not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made up narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a caricature position, how is this addressed by basically amplifying bullshit further? The 'other side' of advocacy for Judge Brown Jackson's nomination is not actually Candace Owens shitposts. That's a disservice to both the idea of narrative and to the position being misrepresented.

> Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional media not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made up narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a caricature position, how is this addressed by basically amplifying bullshit further?

All narratives are made-up narratives. The problem is, your bullshit/not-bullshit dichotomy doesn't necessarily line up with someone else's. Your idea of bullshit versus not-bullshit has your own priorities/associations/assumptions baked into it. A steel-manned version of the opposing argument probably isn't going to line up with the average statement of the argument as you're likely to find it in the wild. You can just ignore shit-posts that you consider bullshit, or you can try to understand the priorities/associations/assumptions that lead people to make those shit-posts.

Kudos to the OP for doing this. Providing people with sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit isn't going to win you any popularity contests though, except among people who already like sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit, which isn't exactly the audience who needs this.

You're not really saying anything here. There are obviously people who are sincerely all-in on Qanon. But Qanon is bullshit. That's not a subjective assessment.

The followers of QAnon presumably don't see any major contradictions between its claims and their {experience, assumptions about how the world works}. If they did, then they wouldn't be followers.

What's unsettling about QAnon is: substantial numbers of otherwise sane, high-functioning followers, probably a bit less intelligent on average than you or me, but not that much less intelligent, find it to be a compelling theory. And that's a rather pessimistic data point that we should bear in mind when calibrating our own degrees of epistemic certainty.

"There, but for the grace of God go I"

We've drifted a fair bit into high abstraction and high-minded quotes but I'm still perplexed about a methodology that is looking for 'peace' and avoidance of 'partisan media' which when fed a very vanilla issue (US supreme court nomination) spits out on one side tweets of the editor of an actual online political tabloid and on the other a dude who used to tweet ((( ))) around people's names. Doesn't that make you go 'huh, maybe this methodology needs tweaking'. Or is it working as intended? Then what exactly is intended?

> Qanon is bullshit.

Can you describe the meaning of this phrase in some detail? I think I probably know your approximate meaning, but I'm interested to know a more detailed articulation of the idea.

If it helps, substitute "flat earthers" for "QAnon".

Do they share the same attributes and values of those attributes? To me, they seem quite different.

I’m often not looking for the “correct” perspective, I’m just looking for what the other perspectives are.

If a lot of people think a certain way, that’s enough for me to want to learn about it.

Yep. More importantly: neither Owens nor Posobiec are journalists, subject to editorial standards and review by a news desk, an organization's editorial staff, the obudsperson, and readers. Even if they were reporters: there's often wildly different standards for tweeting versus their published work product under the organization.

There is also a difference between reporting, analysis, and opinion, which a lot of people seem to either not understand or purposefully ignore...and that an organization can engage in all three, and that all three units have very different standards.

He appears to have taken the middle road fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation) and a wild definition of "reporting"...then decided to claim he's generating a "news product" from that. That's...not how that works?

The site's "About" page has a graphic that includes the "Q-Anon Shaman", a guy who spouts no end of conspiracy theories (one sample: TVs and radios emit brain-controlling inaudible frequencies)...with an animated bouncing buddha.

I also don't see how he or his "editor" are qualified to be doing journalism review....especially not compared to plenty of other organizations already doing it.

He claims to be doing "PG research" at a UK university. Curiously the only place his name appears on a Heriot site is as a postdoc researcher in a group that has nothing to do with journalism https://cabs.site.hw.ac.uk/about/. I also see no evidence of him ever having been published academically; how he's managed that as a postdoc, I don't know.

You’re doing the thing they’re trying to fix.

Two big problems are topic selection by following the mainstream media and treating bullshit as views that should be understood.

Narratives should ignore the bullshit, and choose topics based on what people want to learn about. There are dozens of wars going on right now, how about a short history and summary of each?