Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net? Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us. It's just that nowadays their reach has gone from the local pub to the globe. Take, for example, when X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, introduced a new feature, "About this account," which includes information about a person's location. The idea was to …
Believing in magic is a just a disguise for ignorance†
More a flagrant advertisement of rather than a disguise I would have thought—a bit like Jodhpurs and jackboots being camouflage for your common garden variety nazi.
† unless you live on the Disc where belief in magic is rational but where the actual practice of magic exhibits suicidally dangerous ignorance.
Know the Dunning-Kruger effect and realize when you yourself are incompetent
Anyone who knows what it is, and is able to recognize their own limitations of expertise generally doesn't need your list.
The ones who need are the people who don't know what Dunning-Kruger is and more importantly don't care, and who believe a few hours of furious googling and watching Youtube video "recommendations" one after the other places their expertise on equal footing with those of people who have studied the subject for years/decades (but without the "bias" those videos will tell them the "academics" have)
One of the funny results in the research of Dunning and Kruger: when you inform the incompetent of their incompetence, many actually review their perceived competence and realize they are, somewhat or wholly, incompetent and start acting differently. All within a degree, of course.
The cartoon On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog dates from 1993.
But never so consistently and pervasively bound together in individuals - a malady or distemper that has infected a large proportion of the US population.
The AI and Crypto bros are exemplars.
"How do you tell what's real on the net? " — Strictly, nothing on the internet is real. At best it can only be a representation of or commentary on something that may or may not exist in the world outside the internet.
The problem predates the internet. Newsprint and radio had its moments in the lies, misinformation and deception stakes especially in less regulated jurisdictions only lacking the immersive depth of the internet.
In most cases the worst internet codswallop can be discounted by simple logic.
The simplest reason I know that Mrs Clinton did not run an Epstein rent-a-teen business out of a pizza bar is that if she had it would be a trillion dollar global franchise today. (Clue: it isn't.)
The ongoing destruction of the NIH and the US CDCs as sources of trusted, reliable, scientific evidence based health and medical information, for sheer vandalism, must rank with the destruction of the classical Library of Alexandria by similarly motivated fanatics.
The point about fine movement of the lips, eyes and eyelids was actually brought home to me earlier today when I was running a few minutes of a video at 0.25 speed to locate a few frames. I could easily detect those involuntary movements in the actors' close·ups.
The ongoing destruction of the NIH and the US CDCs as sources of trusted, reliable, scientific evidence based health and medical information, for sheer vandalism, must rank with the destruction of the classical Library of Alexandria by similarly motivated fanatics.
You're calling me an anarchist?
Sorry, the CDC has been biased since its inception. The University of Mississippi has a farm where it has been growing marijuana for pharmaceutical testing for decades. Even if you ignore that, studies have proven that its use has beneficial effects on medical conditions. Therefore, it cannot be 'Schedule I', but it is. The fact that its taken this long, and its still not been reclassified tells me that I shouldn't trust anything else that comes, or has ever come, out of the CDC. FYI, I wouldn't trust RFK jr as far as I could throw his family's ego.
Lets talk about COVID masks next. In January of 2020, the CDC website had a Q&A videpo lecture posted on the subject of N-95 masks and the prevention of disease. It was from the late 1990s/early 2000s and had been recorded during a surgical conference. Soon after they announced that wearing an N-95 mask would prevent the spread of COVID, that video was taken down. Why, you ask? Well, the medical professionals in the video described the sizes of viruses that would be stopped by the various types of masks: from a simple handkerchief all the way to a pressurized rubber containment suit with self-contained oxygen. It turns out that an N-95 mask was described, in that video, as inappropriate for preventing the respiratory transmission of COVID-sized viruses. Abrafuckingcadabra, and that video was taken down.
In short, if they lie once and you don't stop them (through ignorance or inability), they're going to lie to you forever. Even when they technically aren't, how are you going to know?
The COVID masks were a cheap way of lessening the transmission of viruses in water droplets from sneezing. In that capacity they would help slow the spread of it FROM the infected mask wearer to others. At no point did the masks protect the uninflected mask wearer FROM infected people without masks..
Btw I am a retired pathologist.
PS It does make me role my eyes seeing people still wearing the mask to protect themselves from others.
>Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us.
Yes, but up until recently, lying was an artisanal business. Every lie was lovingly handcrafted by an expert liar.
Nowadays, lying has been industrialized. Information sources are swamped by incredible amounts of lies, mass-produced by soulless machines. It's hard to find a good old-fashioned lie these days, like my granny used to make, when she told us that if we went swimming after lunch we'd die, just so that she could take a nap.
Seriously; liars have always been with us, but the same is true of coal. And yet, the greenhouse effect has never been a problem, until relatively recently. Why? Because quantity, when there's enough of it, becomes quality.
That is, any phenomenon, once you scale it up by enough orders of magnitude, not only increases known problems, but it also creates entire new problems that weren't there at all before. That's what we're beginning to see with industrial-scale lying. And it's only the beginning. Be afraid.
…every village had its village idiot(s). The people living in the area usually knew who they were and anything they said would be largely ignored or taken with a very large pinch of salt.
Then mass communication came along, particularly via the Internet, and all the village idiots found a whole worldwide community of other village idiots and were not only able to have their own local idiocy validated, but also construct ever bigger, more complex and far-reaching forms of global stupidity.
Then a few non-idiots with questionable (or, rather, non-existent) morals figured that all these idiots were really just a ripe resource that could be used to further their own financial and/or political ends and here we are.
The human race is pretty much screwed. Last one to leave, please turn out the lights.
Remember that Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister for Propaganda and Enlightenment was around long before the internet - putting out industrial levels of bollocks. Along with his cohorts in the Soviet Union.
Not that it was anything new then. Everything from coins to royal portraits have been used, over millennia, in order to spread the message required by the ruler in question.
Take for example "King" Hatshepsut 1479 – 1458 BC - I believe she's too early to be Pharoah, so should still be titled King, but I ain't no Egyptologist. When her hubby :Thutmose II died, she was regent for her infant son. No problem, being a female regent. But then she co-reigns with him and not having a set-up for ruling women, she simply styled herself King and got herself a nice beard. You can say anything with statues...
As an example, have a look at Henry VIII's suit of armour that's definitely not writing a cheque that he can't cash.
Mass propaganda has always been a thing, but it's not the same as what we have now. Goebbels-style lies needed full control of all available media, same for Stalin or the monarchs of old. You could run propaganda outside your borders, but it was difficult and limited, and you could never overwhelm local discourse entirely.
Today, you can flood rival nations with industrial-scale lies. Or you can flood your own nation without even being in the government. That has never been possible until very recently.
Filippo,
The Soviets spent most of the Cold War flooding the world with lies. And we had to build institutions to try and deal with it. Something we'd let go after the Cold War ended, and our politicians have been slow to think about when Russia and China started using the same playbook again. It is easier, as you say, because the internet has made it much easier to get information to people direct - but I can remember Soviet propaganda from the 1980s, even as the Soviet Union was collapsing round their ears.
Of course, in countering propaganda, we have to be careful not to resort to it ourselves. Which is very difficult, if not impossible. Once you give a government the power to shape the news, they'll use it to protect themselves - and both the politicians and the bureaucrats will take advantage of this to protect their own narrow self-interests.
Also resilience against foreign propaganda requires more belief in your own government. A trusted system is less easy to subvert. Our governments are now way more open than they were in the Cold War, and in some ways a lot more honest and transparent. But also a lot less self-disciplined.
you said about governments being way more open and transparent. Then you lost me.
Also best part of Western propaganda is that people don't see it as propaganda. This was a big difference between Soviet and Western propaganda, the people in Soviet Russia were able to recognize their own propaganda lies.
"King" Hatshepsut
You are right.
She titled herself King and was referred to as such. The title Pharaoh, being from the Egyptian Per-ah meaning "Great House" came later and she couldn't have been called Queen as the title did not exist.
The same with "Prince", again not used for the Ancient Egyptian sons of the King. They were just "King's son".
she simply styled herself King and got herself a nice beard. Don't forget the bull's tail also worn by the king.
Why is nobody turning the screws on China, who produce 30% of World CO2 ? Expanding coal use by 1000MWe WEEKLY.
My suspicion is that some powerful financemen have very nice business with both China-production and at the same time doing the CO2 scam in Britain and Germany.
Russia produces 4% of CO2 and have no intention to scale down whatsoever.
Britain about 1.5%, Germany 1.7% or so.
This awfully looks like a hugely successful COMINTERN information operation.
I use Youtube as a tool to research aircraft of WW2.
Just lately there have been a number of channels that have appeared purporting to give unusual insights into the subject, They are in the form of dialogue backed with still photos illustrating the points being covered.
The "photos" are the give-away. They are obviously AI generated with all the well known signs that they not the real thing. For example a picture supposedly showing a Mosquito bomber in German hands has a heavily framed nose piece. All Mosquito bombers and reconnaissance versions had a frameless moulded perspex dome, not the Germanic looking monstrosity shown. In an another video the wartime signs warning about careless talk etc. were pure gibberish.
The same goes for the commentary. It too seems to have been AI generated and I'm not even sure that the narrator was a human.
Now for someone like me all this sticks out like a sore thumb but for less experienced people the danger is that this fake information will spread and infect our sources such that we cannot any longer be sure what is real and what is fake.
It seems to me that this is all a "get rich quick" scheme and damn the consequences.
I get a lot of videos coming up that have clearly been ripped off (frequently the image has been reversed, supposedly to try and defeat DR scanning) with clearly AI generated and voiced commentaries that frequently bears little relation to the video content. Unfortunately the algorithms could down-votes as "interaction" which helps promote the content.
I've been trying the "do not show me this channel again" option you get in Youtube. Hoping this will have an effect on the algorithm, after watching a bit of one and realising it's crap. Having found some rather excellent history on their recently. Came across Drachinifel on Naval history and have been enjoying many hours of his top quality content - watched a few aviation things on there as well, and there's a hell of a lot of AI crap that's clearly an AI voice and the Wiki page, put to a few photos in order to get the advertising clicks.
I think the other clue is breadth of expertise and output. There are some channels producing too many videos to be possible with one person writing them. Plus you get a channel on aviation that has a side channel on ships, another on civil engineering and another on tanks - or opinions on Ukraine. Well I've got interests and opinions on all of those too, but I wouldn't be able to discuss all of them expertly enough to be worth an hour long video.
I think the other clue is when people express a lack of knowledge. A good expert will say that, "I think this, but can't know it because the sources disagree. Even when I went back to look at primary sources."
It's a wonderful resource, despite Google's best efforts to wreck it in order to juice those extra few pennies of revenue.
to research aircraft of WW2:
1) IHYLS should be alright, I hope?
2) About that Mosquito: If it was in German hands, couldn't that glass dome have been shattered (or damaged) when they captured it, and therefore replaced with a German-style one? (Or if they just preferred them that way?)
I got the same stuff from yt.
To me, most of the voice sounded genuine, but the Images presented were cr4ptastic. He-111s flying next to F-35s in a piece about the F4 and the like.
When you spot disinformation, report to yt. This should alert the algorithm. In theory, at least.
Report and downvote obvious trash.
> Report and downvote obvious trash.
I wasn't aware that you could do that on Youtube (which I only use anonymously), and I'm a bit sceptical that it would have any effect, but thanks for the tip.
The trouble is that the value of "obvious" is variable. I've had both relatives and good friends inform me that earnestly that "they're going to bring back" various british cars from the 1960s. Probing inevitably reveals that Youtube is the source of this "information".
Spoiler: they're not. It's AI slop, and yet my pals and rellies watched it, so lucre was earned. Why would you not do that?
-A.
There are tools to be used, some provided as parts of platforms, some paid, but all of them require time and effort that negate the time savings that internet news once provided. A tragedy to be sure. And saying "everything is biased" is just trying to rationalize propaganda.
Was expecting something a little more informative and less "show me the author is against the right and dislikes Elon musk without saying it literally". Either lean in all the way to make a parody or just stop. Guess I should have researched the author before I invested this. (Another method to find heavily biased views--either way)
saying "everything is biased" is just trying to rationalize propaganda.
It's simple fact. We're all a tangle of biases and opinions and any time we share those opinions and beliefs our biases come with them. Outside of hard mathematics it's very hard to find unbiased text of any kind.
> Sounds like a lot of work to figure out what's true and what's not,
In general, the best way to get less biased "news" about a country's politics (though why you should want to is also highly dubious). is to see what sources outside that country are saying
Many times, things that are splashed across "news" sites within a country are not mentioned at all, outside of it.
Another thing that has fallen out of fashion, especially in the US, is respect for expertise.
This is true. Experts can be inconvenient and say things you want aren't possible - very annoying.
However "listen to the experts" can also be cover for "appeal to authority" instead of proper argument. You have a link talking about doctors recommending to ignore the new CDC site on vaccines - but I remember the British Medical Association during Covid saying that the government were wrong to delay 2nd dosing of patients with vaccines in order to get more people their first dose quicker.
In this case it was a bunch of doctors (via their union) having a go at a government they didn't like - although there were many with genuine fears about this policy. Even other governments publicly criticised the decision - although in the case of France I think that was sour grapes about us having more vaccines than them and Emanuel Macron who had his advisors briefing the press that he had read so much about the matter that he was basically an epidemiologist at this point (hence was personally making French policy).
It was a risk, and the people who decided on it knew it was a risk and said so at the time. But it was actually real experts in the JCVI - who were a mix of doctors and epidemiologists - whereas most of the BMA critics were ordinary doctors - who are therefore not much more expert in epidemiology than anyone else.
Expertise is vitally important. But can also lead to groupthink - as well as group self-interest. So you need to be almost as sceptical of them, although that's much harder to do, since they definitely know more than you do about what they're talking about.
I'd argue that our experts letting us down is at least one of the reasons we have so much of a problem with populism at the moment. If they'd done a better job, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation. There are too many centrist politicians in this day and age who seem to be willing to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast - and promise they can do them and everything will be fine. Which makes them harder to distinguish from the Donald Trump's of this world, who'll just handwave difficult questions away and claim that he can easily do difficult things (despite having all the capacity for long-term thinking and planning of a hyperactive mayfly on speed). Give me the days of grumpy old centre right conservative types in suits, who tell you that you can't have jam today, because we can't afford it. But if we work hard, save hard and invest, we might have jam tomorrow. Rather than centrist politicians talking about how they can have all of the transport carbon neutral by 2035 (No! 2030! Don't you even care about the environment?!?!). Even you're going to be a centrist realist, then you need to actually be realistic.
The thing is that expert groupthink is still experts doing it. Compared with the rest of our down-the-pub back-of-the-envelope reckons it's almost guaranteed to be better grounded.
The people whose views make a difference when the consensus is incorrect are dissenting experts, and they are generally persuasive in the long run, although that can take too long. A good example of this is the "Covid is only transmitted in droplets" theory which seemed to be shared right across the public health community when the pandemic began although the only evidence for it came from a paper written in the early 20th century that formed the root of a tree of citations to become an orthodoxy most of a century later, and was fairly self-evidently flawed. It is generally accepted now that viruses can be airborne and that mitigations like standing a couple of metres apart don't help very much, but overturning that view took too long and cost lives.
Even now the logical conclusion that HEPA filtration can keep people much safer in healthcare and educational settings is a step too far for most organisations, even though the evidence is unambiguous.
Science and expertise are our best route to understanding the world, but they aren't infallible. Part of how we improve things is acknowledging that imperfection and working to mitigate that. We don't need right wing politicians for that. If anything the right's preference for hierarchical thinking is more likely to result in deference to bad ideas expressed by the right people. We need smart, humble, honest, open-minded people, both in science and in politics. Unfortunately those seem to be pretty hard to come by.
"I'd argue that our experts letting us down is at least one of the reasons we have so much of a problem with populism at the moment."
I'd alter that slightly as "I'd argue that our expectation that experts should be able to fix anything and their letting us down on this incorrect belief is at least one of the reasons we have so much of a problem with populism at the moment."
For example, one of the groups of experts who is most often accused of letting us down is economists unable to predict recessions, except that:
1. Many of them did predict them but it was more fun to keep investing than listen to those buzzkills.
2. They were being complained at for not predicting something they can't predict. Economists can often explain how risky a thing is in the long term, but that doesn't give them the power to know when something's going to fail down to the month. If they could, they'd have all the money and would probably rule the world. Expecting that they can predict with that degree of precision is as foolish and as doomed as expecting that a really genius doctor can tell you when precisely you will die by reading your MRI results.
3. Pretty much nobody was listening to economists until things went horribly wrong, and then the economists that were later blamed for failing to predict were called in to suggest how to clean it up, and by the time they could make any suggestions that would be listened to, they only had the choice between options that were all extremely expensive and wouldn't reverse the problem from which they tried to select the one that would cause the least damage, which means they got blamed a second time for not bringing everything back to when it was all fun.
It's the same with all the other kinds of experts. Experts in medicine can't make a pandemic disappear. Experts in criminal justice can't make people stop wanting to break laws. Neither experts in diplomacy nor expert military strategists can cause world peace. As long as we keep riding the pendulum between expecting that they can do those things and getting dismissive because they can't, we'll never go in the extra direction of figuring out what they can do well and how that connects to the rest of us.
"I can only suggest that you treat every hard to believe, too good to be true, or just downright fantastic claim.."
Sadly, those are visible targets. The reality (especially since AI slopped its way into our lives), is that small, highly plausible lies/falsehoods are sewn into the fabric of any information. They can magnify into major issues, and there are dark arts devoted to this subtle manipulation too. Basically, anything in the digital realm is a potential mirage. Anything.
When I tire, I look at the tangle of trees and ivy outside my window.
Good question for any org claiming to rate media bias. A concern for me is that MBFC and another media bias org, NewsGuard, show such high levels of agreement, despite the latter operating at ISP level in the UK.
Both rate Fox News as unreliable, for example, but describe them as centre right. That may be true for the US, but not so for the UK.
There is also the fact that media bias reviews are based on subjective criteria, not scientific method.
So the Redtops here want to convince us that Covid vaccine were essentially something great and good. All the products pushed by oligarchs, banks and corporations are essentially something good.. They can do nothing wrong, these commercialists cannot have malicious effect on the mass media.
I claim:
1.) Covid vaccines were dangerous quick+dirty substances pushed by the king of improvisation, William H. Gates. A man without proper, completed education. Not even beancounting.
2.) CDC VAERS WONDER had a very strong Adverse Effects Signal. Factor of 10000 more reports of near-death adverse effects than e.g. Measels vaccines.
3.) Out of my probably 300 acquaintances+friends, at least 2 had very serious adverse effects from Covid vaccine. One near death heart inflammation. Several others reported severe, though not live threatening adverse effects.
I am by no means a communist, quite the opposite. But neither do I think the oligarchs are super intelligent and super above board.
Thank god there are forces who do not worship Mammon.
Frank Gerlach
Brackenheim
Germany
was very heavily biased to the left. Snopes, for example, is not an even handed, objective website. They just say they are. I also same the same sort of BS trying to convince me to vote for Biden, and later Harris, that I was from people trying to convince me to vote for Trump.
The truth is usually somewhere in the middle, but question them all, not just the ones that challenge your viewpoint. The ones that agree with your viewpoint are just as twisted, and not to be trusted.
Remember Richard, former SIS man, who wrote a book called "big breach" (find it with google for free).
SIS and BBC would spread disinformation about their little dissident Richard, labeling him a "terrorist". Which could have killed him e.g in France, when police broke down his hotel room door.
I think Richard was not the smartest cookie(not seeing the cues, rebelling against superior power etc), but labeling him this way was clear and dangerous misinformation.
"the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters/second"
According to the standards converter...
https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
You are travelling at 9999.7484% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.
