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While I agree that bad posting behavior is what needs to be moderated, posting misinformation, including hot takes on twitter that either misrepresent their source or spout bullshit about it, actively poisons debate in such a way that actively refuting bullshit often contributes to the problem. Debate and discussion doesn't help, it often hurts, and moderation is therefore necessary to stop it. Posting misinformation should be an automatic probe, full stop. The core phenomenon at play here is the backfire effect: the finding that refuting false information reinforces memory for the false information and, in the process, makes the falsehoods more likely to be believed by those who hear it. This isn't the only reason why lies and bullshit poison debate, but it's the most pernicious in my view. Essentially, the problem has to do with the basic fact that, the more we experience some event, the more likely we are to remember it. Studying material more often makes us do better on tests, controlling for all other factors. Someone who watches a movie several times will be more likely to recall the names of the characters, recite memorable lines, and so on compared to someone who saw the movie only once. This is a well-established facet of human memory. To apply that to misinformation: one side states a lie. The other side refutes the lie. However, in the process of refuting the lie, the lie itself is repeated. That repetition makes the original lie more memorable than its refutation because it's been experienced twice (vs the refutation which has happened once). By virtue of refutations repeating the lie, even in the form of refuting it, it exposes the audience to the lie more and more often and therefore makes it more memorable. Setting aside additional problems concerning pre-existing beliefs (a worldview consistent with the lie makes the above problem even worse in multiple ways), simply increasing the memorability of a lie makes it more likely to be recalled later on, and believed. [EDIT: Note here that the lie will always be more memorable than the refutation because the refutation repeats the lie. It does not matter how many times it's refuted.] This is not an abstract point. The misinformation effect has helped sustain the myth of vaccines and autism, conservative and fossil fuel industry mistruths about anthropogenic global warming, and so on. Here on SA, this happens repeatedly in USPOL discussions. The effect is so pernicious that those who have fallen for it explicitly state that the other side is lying about verifiable facts such as the congressional record, written statements by politicians, and sometimes even their own posts in the USPOL main thread. This goes beyond the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. This is a fundamental aspect of human cognition that bad faith posters on this forum and on twitter are (perhaps unknowingly) taking advantage of. Lewandosky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwartz, and Cook (2012) do a pretty good job reviewing the broader problem, including the backfire effect, and I recommend the read to a general audience (note that there are other less-well-known cognitive psychologists out there studying this who deserve far more recognition than they get because the first author sops it all up because he co-wrote this really good paper 9 years ago). Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 17:23
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The reason I put propaganda outlet in scare quotes is that I am not sure the people using propaganda outlet mean propaganda outlet, or only a subset of that category. The continued insistence of stressing foreign really seals the deal for me in this regard, and is extremely funny to read for me since every news source even mentioned in this thread is a foreign outlet to me. But I see that Roland Jones has already expanded on that point. Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Feb 9, 2021 |
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Feb 9, 2021 05:01
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A Buttery Pastry posted:This thread is about D&D, not USPOL. Unless it is actually just about USPOL rules? In which case, might I suggest making American politics a subforum of D&D and disallow it entirely in D&D proper rather than creating some sort of dual-rules system where you have to guess whether the American moderators believe it to be an American thread using American rules. fool of sound posted:As we begin the restructuring of USPol, it's important to discuss this now: what should the expectations be for posted sources? How responsible are posters for the sources they post? My hope is that, with feedback from this thread, we can develop solid guidelines for posting, discussing, and debunking sources that can be added to the rules thread and give us a solid basis for enforcing better discourse. And holy poo poo I never thought the below would happen, so let's hit this nail on the head until it's so unrecognizable that you can in earnest argue it's not a nail. quote:This is what I mean when I say I don't trust the definition of "propaganda outlet" in this thread. Put another way, if I didn't include that aside, your own statement here would be a complete, rather than a 99%, non-sequitur, which is only slightly less interesting than using "other people will disagree with you" as some kind of win for your position. I'd much rather live in a world where I don't have to explain all this, but here you are and here I am. Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Feb 9, 2021 |
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Feb 9, 2021 07:49
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... I had my own ideas and effortpost behind them, but these ideas are better. I might still do the effortpost because it gets into some useful working examples, but I want to focus on just one because:fool of sound posted:I was working under the assumption that the link/embedded tweet would point to them as a source. If it's someone subtweeting the article or the source is otherwise not immediately obvious, then absolutely. This was emptyposted in USPOL back in December. If you're not familiar with what's going on here, Rebekah Jones worked for the Florida state government and was fired after refusing a request to falsify data in such a way as to make the Florida COVID situation look better than reality. This all happened in the broader context of Florida governor Ron De Santis really wanting to re-open the state. She later made her own dashboard to report what data was publicly available and whether conditions on the ground were favorable to reopening. If you already knew who she was and what was going on, then it was immediately obvious what the context of this tweet was (the state pressuring a whistleblower) and why it was relevant to USPOL. If you didn't, then it looked like a goon just posting a random tweet by someone. I was in the later group. I recalled the broad strokes of what was going on in Florida and knew there was a whistleblower who made their own website, but I didn't know it was that person. To be clear: this was a good tweet that belonged in USPOL and I am ultimately glad it was posted. However I suspect that the poster emptyposted the tweet, rather than provide context, because it was immediately obvious to them who she was, what the context of this tweet was, and why it was worth sharing. Alas, it was not so clear for everyone.
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Feb 11, 2021 15:22
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