Re:A.I. Muddies Israel-Hamas War in Unexpected Way
by AnthonyMouse on Saturday October 28, 2023 @12:36PM
(#38051158)
> the voices that advocated for the truth suddenly switch sides. WHAT.
The media is people. Bias is the default. Sometimes the bias of one organization aligns with the truth, on some issue. That doesn't mean it will on every issue, or will tomorrow if it did yesterday.
Objective reporting is rare. And the reason for that is that it's hard to distinguish. The reason you're watching it on a screen is that you aren't there and you don't know what the truth is, so you're trusting someone else to faithfully convey what's happening. How do you know if they don't?
Sometimes it's more obvious than others. The truth is always logically consistent with reality. It's possible because it happened. Whereas lies have no such constraint. So you can detect lies -- sometimes -- because they contradict themselves. It's the same reason authors publish a novel and then get letters from readers telling them all the mistakes they made -- fiction is inconsistent with reality because otherwise it wouldn't be fiction. And so the more inconsistencies you detect with someone's reporting, the less you trust them.
But that's just a heuristic. Someone tells the truth 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is a lie. Someone lies 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is the truth.
We want to pretend we can know for sure, but that's not how it is. Then nihilists want to claim that you can't know anything so you might as well give up, but that's not how it is either. Being 95% sure isn't the same as being 40% sure.
The media is people. Bias is the default. Sometimes the bias of one organization aligns with the truth, on some issue. That doesn't mean it will on every issue, or will tomorrow if it did yesterday.
Objective reporting is rare. And the reason for that is that it's hard to distinguish. The reason you're watching it on a screen is that you aren't there and you don't know what the truth is, so you're trusting someone else to faithfully convey what's happening. How do you know if they don't?
Sometimes it's more obvious than others. The truth is always logically consistent with reality. It's possible because it happened. Whereas lies have no such constraint. So you can detect lies -- sometimes -- because they contradict themselves. It's the same reason authors publish a novel and then get letters from readers telling them all the mistakes they made -- fiction is inconsistent with reality because otherwise it wouldn't be fiction. And so the more inconsistencies you detect with someone's reporting, the less you trust them.
But that's just a heuristic. Someone tells the truth 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is a lie. Someone lies 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is the truth.
We want to pretend we can know for sure, but that's not how it is. Then nihilists want to claim that you can't know anything so you might as well give up, but that's not how it is either. Being 95% sure isn't the same as being 40% sure.