Media Analysis & Criticism

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fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Over the last decade the internet has increasingly morphed, twisting itself around the weighty presence of rapidly expanding content aggregators and social media and, with the ease of access provided by these services, the societies of the developed world are increasingly online. Traditional media sources have been forced to adapt to this new environment and worse, have been forced to compete with new breeds of competitors suddenly made viable thanks to websites driven by user generated content. Together, these changes have transformed the already hectic news cycle into a constant deluge and, coupled with ever falling standards, deliberate misinformation, and an appalling lack of media literacy, it is increasingly difficult to assemble an accurate picture of any major news story.

This thread is intended for goons to cooperatively improve their ability to navigate the fraught modern media landscape; assisting one another separate fact from editorial, guiding each other to quality information, and teach each other to avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias.

This thread will be strictly moderated. To an even greater degree than most other threads, you are expected to read entire articles, think about them critically, and make thoughtful, earnest posts. Remember: bad articles aren't necessarily propaganda, and 'universal skepticism' is frequently just as intellectually lazy as credulity.

If you want to dunk on outright obvious garbage, consider instead posting in the Right Wing Media thread. This thread is for analysis and potentially debunking of competently constructed articles.

The following primer was prepared by Discendo Vox, and I strongly suggest make a point of reading it before getting too deeply entrenched in this thread.

fool of sound fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 01:26

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 06:23

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Discendo Vox posted:

Part 1: What is media literacy?

Let's start from the beginning.

This is the Shannon and Weaver Communication Model.

(Note that this is a model of communication. This material will have a few models; the thing about models is they're simplified representations that explain one set of relationships by sacrificing detail elsewhere. I am also simplifying these models, as many of the real ones get very complex.)

Shannon and Weaver is a classic. It�s the foundation of entire fields of theory. But let�s put some flesh on these bones. Why do we care about this?

Example 1
DnD mod GreyJoyBastard loves classic film The Princess Bride, and has always thought it deserves more appreciation. He writes a long, meandering OP in CineD discussing his love of the film, and promoting his idea, an HD re-release shown in theaters.

GJB has a message he wants to convey, but he can't just beam it into people's heads- he has to encode it into a message into a form other people can translate. This post passes through the channel or medium of the forums.

Unfortunately, this medium has a source of noise, or distortion, that warps or limits the content of the message. All communications have sources of noise, but SA has an especially bad one: radium�s code. The post that is ultimately displayed is scrambled.

Several users see the new thread. Among them is Jeffrey of YOSPOS, who sees the post and reads it, decoding it in the context of some�detailed�children's cartoon fanfiction GJB had been posting earlier. He decides he's had enough. GreyJoyBastard is demodded and permabanned.

What have we learned?
First, what you mean isn�t the same as what you say, or what your audience hears. Your ideas or beliefs or intentions have to be converted into a message, which travels through a medium that further distorts its content, and then has to be interpreted by the recipient.

Second, to communicate your meaning, you have to think about how the message will be received. It�s not enough to care passionately about your beliefs. Hell, caring passionately can make it harder to communicate! You need to be able to anticipate how your message will be mediated to construct your message so that it conveys your desired idea and your audience will understand it. GreyJoyBastard didn�t have too much of a chance because of radium, but if he�d included a short message at the top of his post saying �I understand this is not like my usual posting, but I promise this thread is not related to my collection of My Little Pony alternate universe harem novellas��it might have helped. He needed to think about how the forums could screw up his message, and how his target audience doesn�t share his well-known love of 1980s camp cinema and costumed horse romance.

If you don�t actively think about how your message will be mediated and received, and how it relates to your goals, you�re talking to yourself, not others. You're masturbating, not communicating. DPPH is closed. We try to discourage that practice these days.

Third and most importantly, all messages are mediated.
When we usually think of media, we think of getting information from an outside source, like a newspaper, that �mediates� the message. But every medium, every source, selects and influences how a message is shaped and ultimately received.

What�s more, messages are mediated many times over. When you see and post a tweet that contains a link to a news story, the reporter is a mediator for the message- but so is the source for the story, and the way they talked to the reporter, and the editor, and the newspaper�s social media account, and the person who retweets it, and the twitter format�and so are you, the person who posts that tweet on the forums.

When we think of media literacy, then it�s not just about understanding how the �news media� operates. We get information in all kinds of ways, and very little of it is only mediated by reporters. Media literacy is about understanding how the process of communication affects the messages we receive, and how we can better participate in communication, as message creators and receivers.

fool of sound fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 01:26

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Discendo Vox posted:

Part 2: The Rhetorical Situation
One useful way to understand any given media source is a framework called "The Rhetorical Situation". This framework was developed to develop and analyze persuasive messages, but it's also great for just improving critical thinking about media. In any situation where communication is happening, each person communicating has three factors to consider.

Exigence (i.e. goal)
The speaker has a particular goal in mind. This goal could be specific political reform, the overthrow of the capitalist state, feeling better about themselves, getting laid, anything. The important thing is that, as covered in the first part, the goal is not the same as the message. When a right-wing pundit wants to fearmonger about a minority, they rarely say �you should be afraid of this minority�. They tell a story about some made-up atrocity that motivates that fear in their audience.

Your goal is not the same as what you are trying to communicate, and it�s not the same as what you want your audience to believe, nor is it the same as the text of the message you send (yes, this is the same lesson as in Part 1).

Audience
Messages need to be written in terms and forms that convey their intended content to a specific audience. If you�re speaking to one person or to a well-defined group and the situation is simple, you can �tailor� your message specifically based on what you know about them. In most situations, though, there are multiple audiences, including both intended and unintended audiences whose response still matters and can influence whether or not your goals are achieved.

Balancing how different audiences will respond to a message becomes more difficult as the number of audiences becomes more diverse. Coded language (like racist dogwhistles, speaking in Spanish, or references to the specific slogans of a protest movement) let the speaker try to split their message�s interpretation for different audiences. Most of the time, though, they�re stuck crafting a message that will offend or appeal to some set of different audiences, and try to reach a balance of different statements, appealing to different audiences, such that their general goals are achieved. If a speech seems tone-deaf, well, it may just not be tuned for your ears. That doesn�t mean it�s necessarily badly composed.
All of this is made infinitely harder by the fact that almost all audiences are now mediated; audiences they are only getting message after it passes through someone else�s hands.

Constraints
Mediators (like the press) are one example of constraints on a message- limitations of format, sources of noise (another concept from Part 1) or misinterpretation, limited time or money or access, that can restrict the speaker�s options. Each of these constraints can screw up an otherwise well-designed message, but the biggest constraint, the greatest restriction, in most modern communication settings, is attention. Everyone involved in communication is trying to figure out how to get their audience to read, to click through, and to share- and that distorts both the initial message, and every other medium or media that it passes through. It�s incredibly hard to get nuance or details through to an audience that isn�t somehow motivated to stick around- and right now most online media just intensifies this constraint.

Exercise 1
Here�s a practice problem to get a feel for what this entails.

Congratulations. You�re Joe Biden. You have to give your first state of the union speech, and Peter Thiel just drained all the blood out of your speechwriter. It�s all on you now, and your speech is in an hour. What�s your goal? What are your different audiences? What are the constraints on your speech? What do you say?

�Why am I not hearing about x?!�
Politicians do not actually control the media- and media attention is an incredibly fickle constraint. There is a constant churn of attempts to get and maintain media attention, and the media ecosystem is more fragmented than ever. The vast majority of press announcements, even from the white house, do not get billing even in conventional press. Mediated, self-reinforced selection newsfeeds like twitter give an even more limited picture. When you blame someone for �not talking about� something, bear in mind that they may actually be talking about that thing- you�re just not hearing about it because your sources of information aren�t providing it to you. If you find yourself asking this question, check to see if the politician or- well, let�s be real, it�s usually the democrats that get blamed for this- the democrats are actually talking about it, and it�s just not getting covered. And understand that �well they should talk about it more� usually means they get to do, or even just talk about, other things less�and you�re not the only person with the only priorities that they need to reach. Good governance does not attract attention like a fat man riding an escalator does. Find better, more direct sources that will tell you more about what is going on. Stop watching the fat man on the escalator.

Consider the message creator�s rhetorical situation
If you think someone is doing or saying something horrible and insane, ask yourself why they are doing it. People are rarely completely irrational, especially in communication. There is usually some motivation, even if it is self-interested or unethical. If your answer requires a conspiracy or some sort of global all-encompassing evil, or if you just don�t have any information that tells you why, your understanding of the situation is incomplete- and the current information source you are using to understand the situation is probably misleading you. Maybe the speaker can�t talk about the subject of a deliberation without derailing it, or there�s a liability issue. Maybe they�re trying to reach out to someone who doesn�t share your values, but whose support is vital to their goals. Maybe they are monstrous and psychotic, but they�re usually gonna have some underlying reason beyond their psychosis! Putting yourself in the shoes of the speaker and thinking through their rhetorical situation will let you start to view any message they put out more critically.

fool of sound fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 01:27

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Discendo Vox posted:

Part 3: Things to consider in modern media
What�s a Lede?
The lede is the main point or draw of an article- the material that is often converted or summarized into the headline. The lede is what drives attention- it is sometimes the only, single new piece of information in the article. Everything after the lede is intended to contextualize that information and help the audience process it. Depending on editorial practices, it is often normal to expect an audience to read the later material. This expects the audience to recognize when the contextualizing material changes how the lede should be interpreted- especially where the lede is a quote about someone claiming something. It�s good practice to put as much immediate context for a lede statement as possible as close to the top of the article as possible, usually in a �nut graf�- the most important context in a nutshell.

�Cletus safari� stories (stories interviewing people with offensive, �backwards� views) are frequently just rubbernecking at bigotry, but often they provide context that is intended to explain how the Cletuses involved arrived at their position�.and some of them are actually designed to be stories about how the original source is a piece of racist garbage with no excuses or redeeming qualities. A media source, especially a print one, expecting their reader to read the entire article is not inherently bad media.

Alternately, lovely media will bury contradictory information in the supporting material in order to promote the idea that the lede is true. This is usually easier to determine on close reading, but a lot depends on your willingness to spend the effort to apply scrutiny- even if the story �feels� true and supports what you were already thinking.

Track cited sources
Media should provide sources. Often if it�s not anonymous, they even give links back to their original source- and even if they don�t, they may give enough context that you can try to find information about that source. Get in the habit of checking the original source, and using that source (which often has much more context) when trying to understand an article.

Interpret usage of sources
When reading any message, ask yourself: Who are the sources? What order are the sources presented in? How do decisions about what sources are quoted, and how, influence my perception of the claims in the story?
This recent story talking about how the US is withholding the AstraZeneca vaccine from other nations is citing entirely to AstraZeneca spokespeople. This tells you something about how the story was formed and how it may be biased.

Authors do not write titles, and titles change
In almost all outlets, a separate staffer writes an article�s title, and nowadays the title may change based on A/B testing (different people get different titles, and eventually the editor takes whichever title was most popular and applies it to all copies of the article). This goes septuple for social media posts. Always click through and read the article. The title is often inaccurate if not misleading- and that�s due to the perversities of the mediating source, not the original text.

"is this an ad"?
Some media, especially online only media, operates principally or in part by reprinting source material from PR wires. This is easy to check. Is it about a new product or study? Does it extensively quote people tied to the subject, and it seems weird that this outlet would have an exclusive interview?

This sort of reporting isn�t inherently unethical, if the PR material is contextualized, or reported as PR material. The new study or product may be news! It�s not propaganda, it�s mediation- hearing about these things, even if they�re promoted, is a part of what you use media for. A large part of what is �news� is reporting what people are doing or saying, even if they�re doing or saying it for money or for press attention.

You�ve got some tools together now, let�s see what you make of them.

Exercise 2
This intercept article came up recently in another thread. Spoiler alert: it is completely full of poo poo. At the same time, it�s very possible that you find its basic message appealing (which is why it showed up in the first place). It makes for a great practice dummy, though, because it�s short and it hyperlinks its sources. So: can you identify the lede, the nut graf, and the twenty-odd ways that it�s misleading nonsense?

This is the basic set of skills you need to practice to parse most media on a surface level. Your goal should be to do it habitually, even when the article doesn't hyperlink its sources or its message just seems obvious.

In the next part we'll get into some of the specific ways that we understand or misunderstand ideas, and how to read the individual sentences and claims of an article in much, much greater detail.

fool of sound fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 01:28

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Discendo Vox posted:

Conclusion: Applying critical thought to media, for goons
You are media
When you post on the forums, you are communicating. The posts of others are also communication. Most of the important parts of the material here applies to you as much as to any conventional media source. You can be a channel through which good information enriches the forums, or a stream of unfiltered bullshit and/or propaganda. Hopefully if you�re the latter, as moderation improves, your posting also improves. Or you�ll get banned.

�Think for yourself� doesn�t mean rationalize more
A core issue with many people�s approach to media literacy is they think of it as finding a single, true lens through which to understand information and the world- a rule or worldview or rubric that they can use to decide what sources are good or bad. This is often couched in the language of universal skepticism, or seeing through the �mainstream media.� �I�m skeptical of every source� and "all media is biased" is bullshit. No one can be skeptical of every source equally, and all too often it means rejecting good sources that are just communicating challenging or unappealing information. Taking these positions actually makes a person even more vulnerable to disinformation, because disinfo campaigns actively target such individuals and prey upon their biases. The Intercept article I cited above OANN will both tell you- they will give you the stories no one else will.

Similarly, a single theory (including, or even especially, �crit� theories that provide an overarching narrative telling you what sources are good or bad) will instead steer you toward messages that appeal to you for all the wrong reasons. There�s a reason these posts are a bunch of material pulled from different sources- a toolkit will make you much more intellectually versatile than a single mythological correct way to understand media.

If you agree with something, look harder
You need to apply much stronger criticism to messages that tell you what you want to hear. This includes �Those people I hate are doing things I hate!� messages. You are a target for misleading information, and you are not automatically more resistant to that information just because you believe you are right or rational or a good person. Meaningful messages and statements are richer in information, and leave themselves open to scrutiny. Finding weaknesses or bias in a source doesn�t make it worthless- but it means you have tools to better evaluate it in context. A claim that appears to have no basis for scrutiny, that seems to you to be absolutely and unambiguously, obviously self-evidently true�is bullshit. And a source or ideology that gives you that level of moral certainty will just make it much harder for you to critically evaluate other information with the baggage it gives you.

Don�t read in a comedy way
Media literacy and critical thought is not about becoming a better arguer or finding a position that�s easier to defend. If anything, it�s the exact opposite- it�s about being able to take a position that is more reliant on facts, on details, on nuance, and more amenable to change. Literacy in media requires an understanding of specific outlets and authors, different sources of information, their methods, strengths and weaknesses, so than you can interpret them with greater nuance. These nuances, these specific details, will in turn give you more tools to read media and evaluate sources critically.

Oh my god, log off of Twitter
Are you and your friends getting your news from twitter? You�re hosed in the head. No, seriously, it has hosed you up on levels you cannot recognize. Twitter is brain poison, and the medium is taking every bit as smelly a dump in your brain as every internet-poisoned racist or hot take artist you�ve ever encountered on there. The comedians you follow aren�t more insightful, the journos you follow aren�t giving you inside scoops, and the information you�re getting is virtually never reaching you before everyone else.

The power of twitter to gently caress up brains is not just that it gives you material that you agree with, or makes you angry at things you disagree with. Twitter makes the information it gives you seem as if it reflects the world. Feeds are fishbowls. The tiny, myopic, ultratailored worldview that twitter gives you fills up your vision and gives you the illusion of understanding much larger, more complex issues. That�s the real danger of social media - not just being wrong, but being certain. If you get your information from twitter, if you have an account and log in and use it regularly - or even if you just socialize with a set of people who pass you information from the site, well, they�re just mediators for the exact same phenomenon.

The only solution- the only solution- is to log off. I mean it. Get other sources of information. Actually subscribe to a newspaper, and read parts that aren�t about today�s memes or what other people are discussing in your favored discord server. (I am not going to tell you that you have to read nonfiction books from outside your usual worldview; ask Hieronymous Alloy in TBB for some recs if you want to really excel.) Read about subjects that you know nothing about and that don�t map onto any part of the prior political identity or culture of social media. Develop expertise, and a more nuanced understanding of the world. This is the only thing that will make you even resistant to the epistemic closure that social media encourages. Resistance to propaganda requires a mental framework and ideological underpinnings that are complex and idiosyncratic enough that no propagandist can tailor a message that can pierce all the experience and tools and perspectives you've learned.

fool of sound fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 01:30

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Discendo Vox posted:

As it came up earlier and I'm desperate to spend less time at the Omaha Zoo's latest exhibit, here's a shorter effortpost on general sourcing and attribution policy terms. fool of sound, this should be uncontroversial so if possible please link it in the OP.

Sources and attribution: the basics
Understanding the conventions of how professional media characterize sources of information can help provide useful context about the intentions of sources and the purpose of a given media message. The below are the common terms in use in the US, and what they generally mean, with examples and some caveats. There's a lot more to cover here, this is just to get us started.

On the record. Directly quotable with attribution, by name. This is functionally the default if you're talking to a reporter, but competent journalists who aren't trying to immediately wreck a source of information are going to usually be more explicit about when they are on the record, unless the interaction is adversarial.
Example:

On background. The source name isn't used, but some sort of other conditional information about the source is provided. (The AP, as a wire service, basically never uses sources on background.) Depending in the circumstances, this can be very useful in determining the motivations of the source. With a great deal of experience with individual authors or outlets, it's possible to narrow the likely set of sources or at least identify common sourcing from particular outlets (for example, the new york times has a fat pipe to several law enforcement agencies in NYC).
Example:

(someone remind me to use this piece to illustrate bad faith and framing effects for the thread at some point)

Deep background. The information can be used but it's never attributed to a source with any detail. This is an extremely ethically risky form of attribution that reporters are usually not supposed to accept; in practice the reporter, aware of the information, is going to use their awareness of this information to find other corroborating sources, or is really willing to go out on a limb.
Example:

You will also see this if a mediator is unable to immediately confirm the source but is confident that it's true and the story is white-hot, such as in disaster reporting. This shows up in the On the Media active shooter handbook for a reason!

Off the record. Not for use in any publication, ever, and usually understood to not even be used in other reporting. This does not mean "quote me anonymously", even if it gets presented that way in popular media! Unsophisticated, abusive sources sometimes try to poo poo in the pool by asserting that something explosive they've revealed is off the record, with the goal of preventing the reporter from ever reporting on it. This one weird trick doesn't work very well.

As mentioned above, reporters with information gained off the record on on deep background are encouraged to get confirmation from alternate sources. With explosive or inflammatory claims that have no on the record sources (and with litigious subjects), the reporter will often get as many sources, with as much attribution as possible, to both protect their original sources and defend the story from attack. This hit absurd heights during the leak-heavy, pushback-prone Trump administration.

Caution:
From my dealings with the press, the above are indeed the normal ways that these terms are used, but there can be significant variations, and truly scummy mediators may not follow ethical policies at all, even if they have them posted. If you're interacting with the press, then understanding and negotiating attribution is very important. If you're working as a mediator with people who like abusing the press, then you can expect them to claim their interpretation of these levels of attribution are different, or even gaslight you about how attribution was negotiated.

If a reporter truly thinks it's worth ruining their reputation over, they can, of course, lie about protecting attribution. At this point, though, there's little keeping them from just lying about what their source says- and if the fact that they've done so is revealed, the journalist will usually find themselves completely unemployable.

More info:
I've primarily used policy materials from the AP and the Washington Post for this post (as I stated elsewhere, these policies are public and actively maintained, which is a good sign about these organizations). Both linked sites have much more contextual detail about their sourcing and quotation policies; this is just to provide some basic vocabulary. At some point in the future I'll go into citation effects and networked mediation, strengths and limitations of standard journalistic attribution practice which are also addressed in these policy sections.

fool of sound fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jun 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 02:17

Grouchio: Aug 31, 2014

[amazed]

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Apr 28, 2021 04:04

Literally Kermit: Mar 4, 2012; t

Don�t comedy it up in this here comedy forum is probably the best approach, but in the very least, comedy it up responsibly. ~~wear a comedyum~~

�Don�t be the noise� is also good advice, although I appreciate thatI I have learned many interesting things from the USPol thread that often have nothing to do with USPol

# ? Apr 28, 2021 04:09

Bel Shazar: Sep 14, 2012

Literally Kermit posted:

�Don�t be the noise� is also good advice

If you approve of the signal. Otherwise maybe be the noise.

e: spelling is hard

Bel Shazar fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 04:18

AtomikKrab: Jul 17, 2010; Keep on GOP rolling rolling rolling rolling.

If you disagree with the signal and believe it is legitimately bad, then send your own signal and decoding to explain so that others may learn and make their own informed judgements.

Or to put it more simply from my experiences working with people with mental illnesses and homeless populations.

Make sure to encode any information you provide in a format your audience will comprehend, do not assume because of someone's circumstances they are less intelligent than you either. Just because someone is really mentally ill does not mean they are stupid (does not mean they do not face intellectual issues either but don't go assuming.)

When getting information from someone try to understand their circumstances and perspective since that will aid you in properly decoding their message. Understanding their mindset will also let you tailor your message (signal) into a form they will better process and understand.

# ? Apr 28, 2021 04:37

Literally Kermit: Mar 4, 2012; t

Bel Shazar posted:

If you approve of the signal. Otherwise maybe me the noise.

Girls rock me boys?

Wait, no, this what I was talking about!

But if we are demonstrating noise and it�s on topic, is it really noise to begin with? :psyduck:

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Apr 28, 2021 04:37

Literally Kermit: Mar 4, 2012; t

All kidding (and threadshitting) aside, I really am interested in this topic, especially anything beyond the Shannon and Weaver Communication model from an introductory college course.

So, for content. I�ll even effortpost, but be aware that I�m paraphrasing from what I was taught, and this is just the gist of what I know. Feel free to correct me if I�m wrong! You�ll be doing it a lot, believe me.

This may come as a shock because you haven�t read much of this post yet, I tend to be a verbose gently caress, and I was considerably worse before taking a technical writing class a few semesters later (both within the last five years, as an adult student). They apply to the same principle: reader �B� does not want to be entertained, but informed. For an example: nobody wants to read an anecdote about who invented the first bookcase, they just want you to explain a set of instructions on how to put together the bookcase they just bought from your company. These people are joyless and boring, but they have a point.

The SA forums have boards where fine upstanding posters such as yourself (who are clearly not joyless and boring; I honestly was not taking a swipe at you before, I�m still bitter my final project on bookcase instructions only got a �C�) come to post to get angry about hosed everything is. Like the proverbial bookcase assemblers, entertainment is secondary and real actual grownup debate and discussion is supposed to take place. Threadshitting/white noise posting/derails are actively discouraged because this is a designated area where the Receiver, �B� legitimately wants to get the message the Sender �A� is transmitting, also with minimal noise. �B� then wants to reverse roles and become the Sender. To sum up, this is because this forum is a two-way channel of communication, similar to Twitter. This is great, but when either A or B have an agenda, or one or both want their egos massaged or their biases confirmed, this inevitably creates an echo chamber.

Contrast a �one-way� transmission, as most media we consume doesn�t need or ask for our, the Receivers�, input - we either get it to us from actively buying a newspaper/skirting around their paywall, channel surfing on tv, hearing it on news radio, unconsciously picking it up from the banner ads on internet comedy forms, or listening to an heir to a pre-package meal fortune preach fascism on Fox News. Interestingly, this last fellow doesn�t necessarily just get broadcast on Fox News, but potentially on all those other forms of media - including me, right now, by talking about it.

Of these, what I am most interested in discussing is how boosting a message works out on a model or something because I just don�t know. What happens when sender �A� has sender C, D, E, and little cat F to boost it along before it gets to Receiver �B�? �B� in this case is subbing in for �absolutely anyone who will listen�. Tucker Carlson still has a reliable platform but we still boost his message, just by talking about it. Other news organizations will do it, even as they make fun of him (now on a daily basis!) And of course, Donald J Trump completely relies on boosting, as his press releases show without instantaneous feedback and a �like�/�comment� counter to validate his fee-fees, he has to rely on people sending his signal for him.

Anyway that�s something I hope is good and desirable in this thread, and look forward to discussing it all!

# ? Apr 28, 2021 13:59

Bel Shazar: Sep 14, 2012

Given your lines of question here, particularly the Fox News example, I would look further into behavioral priming.

https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/the-american-quest-for-redemption/does-hearing-words-like-wrinkles-cause-you-walk-slowly/

And then consider the effect that such propaganda broadcasts have in shaping the impulses, thoughts, and actions of the receivers (be they primary consumers of Fox News or people who catch a ricochet walking through some office waiting room). Tucker says it, someone here boosts it, and now we're all subtly influenced by their behavioral priming.

e: better examples
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ar...ence%20(e.g.%2C
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221779554_Behavioral_Priming_It%27s_All_in_the_Mind_but_Whose_Mind

# ? Apr 28, 2021 15:40

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

A lot of the priming research turned out to be unreplicable, or downright fraudulent, but it's a decent concept. A broadly related concept from rhetorical theory is "framing", a subject about which suez-blocking amounts of ink have been spilled. Goffman wrote the main book on framing, it's one of the subjects I wound up excluding from the intro materials because I couldn't make it even remotely engaging. [edit: that's a crappy scan, I'll try to find a better one at some point, I don't have my copy of the book anymore to make one of my own]

On Literally Kermit's post, that ties into circular journalism and graph theoretic communication models, especially social network analysis. I can try to write something up on it...eventually. I'm going to post little in this thread though, because you already got several thousand words from me and I don't want to dominate the conversation.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Apr 28, 2021

# ? Apr 28, 2021 15:44

Leon Sumbitches: Mar 27, 2010; Dr. Leon Adoso Sumbitches (prounounced soom-'beh-cheh) (born January 21, 1935) is heir to the legendary Adoso family oil fortune.

Discendo Vox posted:

A lot of the priming research turned out to be unreplicable, or downright fraudulent, but it's a decent concept. A broadly related concept from rhetorical theory is "framing", a subject about which suez-blocking amounts of ink have been spilled. Goffman wrote the main book on framing, it's one of the subjects I wound up excluding from the intro materials because I couldn't make it even remotely engaging. [edit: that's a crappy scan, I'll try to find a better one at some point, I don't have my copy of the book anymore to make one of my own]

On Literally Kermit's post, that ties into circular journalism and graph theoretic communication models, especially social network analysis. I can try to write something up on it...eventually. I'm going to post little in this thread though, because you already got several thousand words from me and I don't want to dominate the conversation.

Counterpoint: :justpost:

You're an informed and informative poster and I learn a lot reading what you're writing.

# ? Apr 28, 2021 16:35

Murgos: Oct 21, 2010

I've found the Brookings institute to have been doing a credible job attempting to discuss and describe disinformation in the media.

Here is an article that discusses in detail some recent disinformation attacks and some of the current methods: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-disinformation-evolved-in-2020/

This one is a bit older but does a good job describing the scope of the problem: https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-to-combat-fake-news-and-disinformation/

Under their media and journalism page you can find lots of links to other articles (https://www.brookings.edu/topic/media-journalism/).

One of the more interesting things that I've really only see them report on is what the major social media sites are doing to combat disinformation.

# ? Apr 28, 2021 16:37

Literally Kermit: Mar 4, 2012; t

Murgos posted:

One of the more interesting things that I've really only see them report on is what the major social media sites are doing to combat disinformation.

Oh good, should be a quick read

# ? Apr 28, 2021 16:47

Murgos: Oct 21, 2010

Literally Kermit posted:

Oh good, should be a quick read

It's more than you would expect actually. For example Google closed a flaw in their results that lifted one off websites with exact matches to a search term that had recently be created to the top result.

This allowed bad actors to make a fake news site (or more than one) and then disseminate a social media post with an easily remembered search term. So, people would 'do their own research' and look up the key term and be directed by Google right to the honeypot giving it an air of respectability.

That these fake sites were designed to look like real news outlets made them even more convincing.

"Look, that outrageous thing I heard is true! I searched for it and there is all kinds of reporting on it!"

# ? Apr 28, 2021 16:59

Mooseontheloose: May 13, 2003

Are there are any good articles on how twitter encourages hot take discourse and how its relates to transmission and reception? for sports, its fun but for politics oh man there are a lot of bad bad bad bad takes that are taken as axiomatic truth.

# ? Apr 29, 2021 20:38

Taffer: Oct 15, 2010

If media defends the powerful, or attacks the powerless, it is bad.

# ? Apr 29, 2021 20:59

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Mooseontheloose posted:

Are there are any good articles on how twitter encourages hot take discourse and how its relates to transmission and reception? for sports, its fun but for politics oh man there are a lot of bad bad bad bad takes that are taken as axiomatic truth.

I can probably track down some theoretical or qualitative stuff, but when I was last active in the area, Twitter had a policy of blocking full academic access to their databases and metrics systems, permitting only limited, controlled (generally useless) slices of data. This was a deliberate obscuring move by the company that completely prevents meaningful graph modeling. There are also deep measurement problems with accurately characterizing tweet content for quantitative analysis. That said, there's definitely a big literature on the use of the medium for false information. Rumor theory in comm sci is one area that studies it; I know there is a whole literature of articles on how twitter spread false information about ebola during outbreaks in the early 2010s.

edit: I should note that because this topic was in academic vogue for a while, there were also some really worthless papers out too. Lotsa folks promoting machine learning or other hot methods as a substitute for meaningful or accurate sampling.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Apr 29, 2021

# ? Apr 29, 2021 21:08

Ytlaya: Nov 13, 2005

It isn't clear to me how the modern media landscape is meaningfully worse than it was in the past.

The main difference seems to be that in the past there was more of a single/universal "understanding of events/reality" that has fragmented in more recent years (largely due to the internet and social media), but I don't see how that's a bad thing when in the past this "universal understanding" just corresponded to whatever the government and wealthy media corporations' stakeholders wanted people to believe. Discendo Vox mentions how "politicians do not control the media," but seems to misunderstand the mechanisms by which consensus is manufactured and media ends up staying within bounds that are acceptable to those with power/wealth. There is no need for the government to directly order the media to say certain things (though I'm sure this probably does happen sometimes). Media corporations have extremely strong incentives towards and against various behavior. They will virtually always want to behave in a way that is agreeable to at least one of the two major political parties, and they will avoid reporting that threatens the interest of their stakeholders. And this doesn't require some sort of direct malicious intent to deceive - it's easy enough for major media organizations to just end up with dominant ideological perspectives that reinforce themselves over time.

There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to. It's better for someone to occasionally have a wrong gut reaction to a misleading headline on Twitter than for someone to carefully parse the news for direct falsehoods while viewing it through the lens of a harmful ideology/worldview. The former isn't even particularly bad as long as the person in question admits when they make mistakes.

For a relevant contemporary example, imagine that someone chooses to believe that President Biden should be given the benefit of the doubt and be assumed to be good and well-intentioned by default. This person, when exposed to a bunch of true information, might use that information to arrive at a positive conclusion, because all they require to reach that conclusion is "the mere absence of hard proof that Biden won't do anything good in the future (or stop doing bad things)." If Biden says he plans on creating a task force to study something, this person will interpret that as "Biden is being good on this issue." From their perspective, mistrusting Biden in this situation would be dishonest and cynical. Someone with the opposite assumption - that Biden should be assumed to be bad by default - will see the exact same true information but interpret it differently, because their position requires hard proof that Biden will do good things (as opposed to hard proof that he won't). This person will view the task force as "something that doesn't actually address the issue or even create any clear timeline for doing so." Using the exact same factual information, these two people end up with two completely different conclusions because they're viewing that information through different ideological lenses.

The accuracy of individual points in the media ultimately isn't very important, because that usually isn't the main thing that determines peoples' overarching beliefs and actions. The problem has never really been "people are being exposed to wrong facts." Any attempt to judge media on this basis doesn't make sense, when you can instead simply look at what our society and country have done during different eras and their respective media environments. Any judgement of media that arrives at the conclusion that it's meaningfully worse now than it was in the past is using a bad measure of quality that doesn't translate to actual outcomes. Someone thinking that Trump is a crusader executing all the pedophiles may be a particularly extreme and amusing falsehood, but it's transparently less harmful than someone trusting the smart/serious-sounding reporting that Iraq had WMDs. The outcome of the information/reporting is the thing that matters, not "how obviously dumb it is." I think people make the mistake of judging these things through the lens of "how does it influence my opinion of this individual's intelligence" rather than any attempt to actually think of their impact on our society and world.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 03:50

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Inaccurate or deliberately false information leading to good outcomes is, at best, a product of prudent guesswork. Correct information is an inherent good regardless of which filters it has been run through by the time it gets to the recipient. Your example doesn't bear out your thesis, the actual outcome as it affects peoples' lives is unchanged regardless of the recipient's presumption of what the factual statement indicates about future action or lack thereof. You then go on to undermine your own point with discussion of serious people making claims about Iraqi WMDs; those were deliberate falsehoods that directly contributed to a bad outcome!

In any case, the primer explicitly talks about the importance of identifying the nature of mediation and how it is distorting the presented information.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 04:14

Sharks Eat Bear: Dec 25, 2004

Ytlaya posted:

Words

Snipped for brevity. Ideology should be informed by as �true� a representation of events as possible. Ideology isn�t only acting in one direction as an interpretative filter of the news; the news should also shape one�s ideology. Sure, there�s no ultimate source of objective truth, but that doesn�t mean the pursuit of more reliable sources is fruitless.

The alternative is that you just get taken for a ride by deceptive reporting that appeals to your ideology, which seems to be the biggest criticism of social media as a political news source (I.e. echo chamber). And it�s not like the news you�re exposed to on social media is spontaneous or organic � it�s also the result of major corporations with their own profit motives that are no better (and arguably much worse) than mainstream news outlets.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 05:41

Josef bugman: Nov 17, 2011; Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

fool of sound posted:

In any case, the primer explicitly talks about the importance of identifying the nature of mediation and how it is distorting the presented information.

It talks about it, but is rather under cut by the assumption that things were better in the past and that the internet media in general has lead to a decline in media competency due to the proliferation of view points that are false and the apparent "necessity" of traditional media concerns keeping pace with them.

This leads into the idea that journalists are able to find truth, publish it and have an interest in it. Or at the very least that they had that interest once upon a time. This is not borne out by looking at the sheer amount of lies, half truths, ad copy disguised as facts and so on that existed long before the advent of the internet.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 10:37

Bel Shazar: Sep 14, 2012

fool of sound posted:

Correct information is an inherent good regardless of which filters it has been run through by the time it gets to the recipient.

What exactly makes correct information an inherent good? Best I can come up with is it can allow one to come to more accurate solutions and take more effective actions, but strictly speaking you don�t need correct information for that... you just need the set of information that would lead to the most apt response...

What makes it �inherently� good?

# ? Apr 30, 2021 13:37

Reflections85: Apr 30, 2013

Ytlaya posted:

It isn't clear to me how the modern media landscape is meaningfully worse than it was in the past.

I strongly agree with that point. The idea that the modern media landscape is worse than the past reminds me of Habermas' public sphere, where it seems like, if I take the definition seriously, it would be a period of bourgeois sociality that lasted for like a decade.

quote:

The main difference seems to be that in the past there was more of a single/universal "understanding of events/reality" that has fragmented in more recent years (largely due to the internet and social media), but I don't see how that's a bad thing when in the past this "universal understanding" just corresponded to whatever the government and wealthy media corporations' stakeholders wanted people to believe.

I would read the concern as quasi-Hobbesian. That what is important not the truth or justice, but 'peace', so a concern that disagreement will lead to conflict, that will in the end result in the breakdown of civil society, thence civil war. It's rather conservative.

quote:

Discendo Vox mentions how "politicians do not control the media," but seems to misunderstand the mechanisms by which consensus is manufactured and media ends up staying within bounds that are acceptable to those with power/wealth. There is no need for the government to directly order the media to say certain things (though I'm sure this probably does happen sometimes). Media corporations have extremely strong incentives towards and against various behavior. They will virtually always want to behave in a way that is agreeable to at least one of the two major political parties, and they will avoid reporting that threatens the interest of their stakeholders. And this doesn't require some sort of direct malicious intent to deceive - it's easy enough for major media organizations to just end up with dominant ideological perspectives that reinforce themselves over time.

I find this paragraph a bit confusing, because I am not sure exactly what you mean. I am reading you as implying that the capital is homogenous, creates the system in which media is produced, and so media will mirror the general interests of capital. I would agree with the second clause and maybe the third, but am sceptical of the first. Capital seems pretty differentiated and I would think different segments of capital have their own interests, which leads me to think that media will also reflect the differences in different segments of capital.

My read on Vox's statement about politicians not controlling the media is that Vox believes, correctly, that power in liberal democratic societies is not reducible to the powers of politicians and that politicians operate under constraints.

This seems true. Vox though seems to be a liberal and so probably does not recognise the way that capital restricts political possibilities. At the very least, their analysis seems a bit too fine grained at times. It focuses on the incentives of the individual reporter, rather than on the incentives of the media sphere under capitalism as a whole. But I am sympathetic to attempts to convert more structural explanations into more individualistic ones.

quote:

There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to. It's better for someone to occasionally have a wrong gut reaction to a misleading headline on Twitter than for someone to carefully parse the news for direct falsehoods while viewing it through the lens of a harmful ideology/worldview.

I am confused at a few points here and particularly when combined with another statement of yours here:

quote:

The accuracy of individual points in the media ultimately isn't very important, because that usually isn't the main thing that determines peoples' overarching beliefs and actions. The problem has never really been "people are being exposed to wrong facts."

At the highest level, I do not understand what your theory of ideology is and how it relates to media production, consumption, and reporting. I would think that ideology is something created by the ruling class and disseminated via false explanations, selective use of facts, slogans, the construction of social structures to inculcate certain practices, dispositions, and attitudes in people, etc. I would think that media, and particularly false media, is quite important in sustaining ideology, but is not the only element in ideological creation or promotion.

Part of my confusion is that you say 'wrong facts' and I cannot tell if you mean a falsehood or a fact that is not relevant, selective, or misleading to the general situation. Since you previously mention falsehoods, I assume the former, but if the latter I would think that the wrong selection of facts is actually quite important for the reproduction of capitalist ideology. For example, capitalists focus on formal equality rather than substantial equality.

Since capitalism rests on distortion, the capitalist class seems like it has a strong interest to promote media that falsely characterises the state of the world. The capitalist class also seems likely to be the most deluded about the world, since they are safely protected from experiences that might serve to contradict ideology and are deeply indoctrinated from birth in capitalist ideology. I would think that recognising those blindspots would give the worker an advantage, thus shifting through media and seeing where the capitalist is (sometimes unknowingly) misdirecting you, may be advantageous.

If the former, the account Vox gives doesn't focus on falsehoods, but instead focuses on framing or spin or distortion more generally. That is, Vox doesn't seem to think that the media lies in the sense of saying that the sky is green, but instead selectively uses facts to push agendas and that our own social networks mediated via social media further this distortion. Insofar as social media was created by capital and exists only so long as it serves the interests of capital (I do not think it is relatively autonomous yet!), this seems plausible although again the Vox does not emphasise the importance of capital, there is still further distortion.

quote:

Any judgement of media that arrives at the conclusion that it's meaningfully worse now than it was in the past is using a bad measure of quality that doesn't translate to actual outcomes. Someone thinking that Trump is a crusader executing all the pedophiles may be a particularly extreme and amusing falsehood, but it's transparently less harmful than someone trusting the smart/serious-sounding reporting that Iraq had WMDs. The outcome of the information/reporting is the thing that matters, not "how obviously dumb it is."

I think the argument you are making is that the lies about WMDs killed more people than QAnon, thus the former is worse than the later. I would agree probably agree, but would be concerned that:

1. It is still not obvious to me how ideology, media reports, and actions intersect in your analysis. Previously, you seemed to imply that statements reported by the media had no real impact on ideology. I assume you think that actions are partially the results of ideology. So do you think the media reports informed the ideology which informed the actions? Because my reading of you previously was that ideology would cause one to justify whatever media reports one received in accordance with the ideology, thus the influence the media report had on the ideology was nil, and so the influence the media reports had on action should also be nil.

2. It is not clear to me who the object of judgment is. I hardly think that the average person embracing the false WMD narrative had much impact on US policy decisions. I would also be willing to bet that had certain policy elites opposed the Iraq War, regardless of popular support it would have been unlikely to happen. So should our only focus of judgment be on those policy elites?

3. I might agree that one is worse than the other, but I am not sure I want to subordinate epistemic norms to ethical norms and even if our ethical norms should take precedent over our epistemic norms when it comes to our actions, I certainly think that we can try to understand how some things might harm us as knowers.

4. One could think that the particular harms of the WMD lie came from a particular configuration of institutional factors, but that there has been an increase in the base rate of bad media reporting, yet the same set of factors has not occurred, explaining why one caused more harm than the other. This effectively expands from (3). We can judge improper epistemic behaviour separate from other types and see why an increase in the former does not necessarily lead to an increase in harm. This would seem to strengthen, rather than weaken, our social analysis.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 13:42

evilweasel: Aug 24, 2002

Bel Shazar posted:

What exactly makes correct information an inherent good? Best I can come up with is it can allow one to come to more accurate solutions and take more effective actions, but strictly speaking you don�t need correct information for that... you just need the set of information that would lead to the most apt response...

What makes it �inherently� good?

This question is baffling. The point of information is that it is correct. Incorrect information isn't information, its garbage, or noise, or entropy, or whatever else you want to call it.

It's like saying "what about being edible is inherently good about food?" The whole point of food is that it's edible, if it's not edible it's not food. A wax banana isn't food. Incorrect information is, basically, a wax banana and trying to consume it is as effective as eating the wax banana. The fact that perhaps you had a chemical imbalance that by a bizarre freak of chance happened to be helped by a chemical in the wax coloring doesn't make it food.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 14:27

evilweasel: Aug 24, 2002

Ytlaya posted:

There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to. It's better for someone to occasionally have a wrong gut reaction to a misleading headline on Twitter than for someone to carefully parse the news for direct falsehoods while viewing it through the lens of a harmful ideology/worldview. The former isn't even particularly bad as long as the person in question admits when they make mistakes.

This is basically the core of your post and so I'm going to respond to this. It boils down, in essence, to "if my ideology and the facts disagree, then the facts are wrong."

You are starting with the premise that your ideology is correct. But given that you are, admittedly, not terribly concerned about if the facts you rely on are false or true, there's no reason to believe that. You can concoct nutty scenarios where someone is presented with a carefully curated list of true facts that is designed to make them draw incorrect conclusions, and compare them to a carefully curated set of lies that, nonethless, cause someone to draw a correct conclusion. But, of course, you can also solve math problems by giving a chimpanzee powerful drugs and, in their drug-addled stupor, note the numbers they hit on a calculator and you will sometimes get a correct answer - while asking a qualified mathematician you may on occasion have him slip up and give you a wrong answer.

There is really nothing that indicts someone's claimed knowledge or asserted analysis more than claiming that operating off of correct, instead of incorrect, facts doesn't matter. It is such a self-evidently wrong position that holding it requires some significant mental rationale. Cognitive dissonance is a pretty well understood thing and this is a prime example of it. The only way you get to explicitly arguing that the correctness of the facts underpinning your worldview and analysis doesn't matter is if the facts have so consistently been against it that you could not manage to maintain your self-image by merely asserting against all evidence those facts are wrong - you needed to retreat to a position that facts literally don't matter. It's like how libertarianism has been so systematically refuted by reality that libertarians started taking the position that you literally cannot test their worldview against the facts.

At the end of the day, nobody has enough facts available to be right 100% of the time, nor time to process those facts. The only way you get better is by recognizing the times you were wrong and being willing to realize you hosed up, admit error, and change whatever led you to that error. People incapable of admitting error are people who make errors consistently, and are entirely unreliable.

Does avoiding wrong facts, deliberate lies, and deliberate attempts to mislead ensure you will always be correct? No. Again: Nobody has enough facts, or time to analyze, to always be correct. But there is no situation, short of carefully curated utter nonsense, where exposing yourself to more misinformation increases your ability to be correct. There is no situation, short of carefully curated utter nonsense, where replacing misinformation with better information reduces your ability to be correct. You will get better by getting better information. Not perfect - but better.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 14:43

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Bel Shazar posted:

What exactly makes correct information an inherent good? Best I can come up with is it can allow one to come to more accurate solutions and take more effective actions

You have correctly identified why it is inherently good.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 14:49

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Ytlaya posted:

There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to. It's better for someone to occasionally have a wrong gut reaction to a misleading headline on Twitter than for someone to carefully parse the news for direct falsehoods while viewing it through the lens of a harmful ideology/worldview. The former isn't even particularly bad as long as the person in question admits when they make mistakes.

This is shockingly authoritarian. Human beings have agency, by denying them true information and feeding them lies you are taking away their basic agency. Controlling information in this manner goes beyond controlling people, it takes away their right to even know they're being controlled.

There is a reason the control of truth is referenced in 1984 as the ultimate form of authoritarianism.

Jarmak fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Apr 30, 2021

# ? Apr 30, 2021 14:52

Owlspiracy: Nov 4, 2020

we also live in a society which recognizes the existence of objective truth and uses that recognition to structure ... pretty much everything. if you, personally, don't believe in truth (which is a valid opinion!) thats fine, but good luck trying to defend yourself in court, or hold a job, or have a conversation.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 14:57

Murgos: Oct 21, 2010

quote:

There is no inherent value to maintaining some sort of high "correct:incorrect ratio" with respect to media and media consumption. Someone can carefully avoid all direct falsehoods and end up believing and supporting a bunch of terrible things because they carry a set of assumptions that make them incapable of correctly interpreting the information they're exposed to.

This is provably false. The source of the error is important. It's the difference between a Type I or Type II error.

If you have all the information and the information is correct and you make an incorrect (or even substantially less efficient) decision based on that information you are faulty.

If your inputs are false and you make a decision that should be correct given the inputs you were provided your system is working correctly and the input is faulty.

This could, theoretically, be the same output in both cases but the source of the error is different.

So, you could only be correct in if there is no value in determining the source of the fault, which I think can be trivially disproved with an example of a simple redundant system.

In the first case three people given the same information where the other two are not faulty will result in a majority opinion that is correct.

In the second case all three people will be in error because their inputs were faulty.

So, the source of the error is actually very important to determining truth.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:00

Josef bugman: Nov 17, 2011; Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

fool of sound posted:

You have correctly identified why it is inherently good.

But that isn't inherently good.

Let's say that I am building a people thresher, which is like a combine harvester but for people, and want to make it the most efficient people thresher it can be. I look at the best and most effective information to build something that is truly awful, and that people have great difficulty in avoiding and getting killed by. Is the truth, in this instance, an inherent good? Because it allowed me to build a machine that is at the upmost effectiveness for killing people?

Jarmak posted:

This is shockingly authoritarian. Human beings have agency, by denying them true information and feeding them lies you are taking away their basic agency. Controlling information in this manner goes beyond controlling people, it takes away their right to even know they're being controlled.

There is a reason the control of truth is referenced in 1984 as the ultimate form of authoritarianism.

If human beings only have agency if they have true information then no human being has ever had agency. We can be fairly close to bits and pieces of info, but we are never going to have a completely correct read on something because we cannot escape the context within which we see and observe things. If we were back in Viking Era Norway and I saw an ash tree I would simply know that it is a type of tree. Whereas a pious follower of the Gods may see it as a link back to a divine progenitor.

Control of information exists throughout every system that we exist within, in some way. From birth onward we exist inside of a context that is not objective, but caused by systems. This means that we cannot see outside of our own contexts.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:03

UCS Hellmaker: Mar 29, 2008; Toilet Rascal

Josef bugman posted:

But that isn't inherently good.

Let's say that I am building a people thresher, which is like a combine harvester but for people, and want to make it the most efficient people thresher it can be. I look at the best and most effective information to build something that is truly awful, and that people have great difficulty in avoiding and getting killed by. Is the truth, in this instance, an inherent good? Because it allowed me to build a machine that is at the upmost effectiveness for killing people?

Dude wtf why would you even try and use this as an example for anything, there are tons of analogies that would have worked and you went with wanting to make a loving death machine. Let alone this being a goddamn strawman argument its stupid as poo poo.

Nothing your trying to prove is even possible with your post. You arent refuting anything with this argument and instead are trying to make an emotional grab in order to invalidate any argument someone has and paint them as someone to hate or mock if they say ITS GOOD TO MAKE A DEATH MACHINE BECAUSE ITS BASED ON FACTS

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:07

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Josef bugman posted:

But that isn't inherently good.

Let's say that I am building a people thresher, which is like a combine harvester but for people, and want to make it the most efficient people thresher it can be. I look at the best and most effective information to build something that is truly awful, and that people have great difficulty in avoiding and getting killed by. Is the truth, in this instance, an inherent good? Because it allowed me to build a machine that is at the upmost effectiveness for killing people?

If human beings only have agency if they have true information then no human being has ever had agency. We can be fairly close to bits and pieces of info, but we are never going to have a completely correct read on something because we cannot escape the context within which we see and observe things. If we were back in Viking Era Norway and I saw an ash tree I would simply know that it is a type of tree. Whereas a pious follower of the Gods may see it as a link back to a divine progenitor.

Control of information exists throughout every system that we exist within, in some way. From birth onward we exist inside of a context that is not objective, but caused by systems. This means that we cannot see outside of our own contexts.

Agency is not a binary state, "no human being has ever had full agency because they've never had complete truth" is a very reasonable philosophical position. That feeding people lies and controlling their information therefor is not inhibiting their agency is not the logical result of that position.

This is like saying no human is truly free so locking them in a 3x3 box isn't removing their freedom.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:10

Josef bugman: Nov 17, 2011; Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

UCS Hellmaker posted:

Dude wtf why would you even try and use this as an example for anything, there are tons of analogies that would have worked and you went with wanting to make a loving death machine. Let alone this being a goddamn strawman argument its stupid as poo poo.

Nothing your trying to prove is even possible with your post. You arent refuting anything with this argument and instead are trying to make an emotional grab in order to invalidate any argument someone has and paint them as someone to hate or mock if they say ITS GOOD TO MAKE A DEATH MACHINE BECAUSE ITS BASED ON FACTS

Sorry, I am trying to say that "if something can be used for bad ends can it be an inherent good". I just thought I'd use a purposefully daft story so that it doesn't touch on something anyone would actually do.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:11

Herstory Begins Now: Aug 5, 2003; SOME REALLY TEDIOUS DUMB SHIT THAT SUCKS ASS TO READ ->>

Josef bugman posted:

But that isn't inherently good.

Let's say that I am building a people thresher, which is like a combine harvester but for people, and want to make it the most efficient people thresher it can be. I look at the best and most effective information to build something that is truly awful, and that people have great difficulty in avoiding and getting killed by. Is the truth, in this instance, an inherent good? Because it allowed me to build a machine that is at the upmost effectiveness for killing people?

If you have to wrestle it into 'but what if I build a human thresher using Truth?' to come up with a counter argument then you're basically conceding everything up to that absurd point. And even then idk what a hypothetical people thresher would even have to do with truth as it pertains to media literacy.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:15

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

Josef bugman posted:

But that isn't inherently good.

Let's say that I am building a people thresher, which is like a combine harvester but for people, and want to make it the most efficient people thresher it can be. I look at the best and most effective information to build something that is truly awful, and that people have great difficulty in avoiding and getting killed by. Is the truth, in this instance, an inherent good? Because it allowed me to build a machine that is at the upmost effectiveness for killing people?

This same example supposes that it is impossible to know if having higher brain functions is good or bad because they sometimes allow people to do bad things. Everything that is consistently effective to any end is a product of the availability of accurate information and it's bizarre to me that several people are unable to immediately discern the difference between ability and motivation.

Generally if people have decided that they are opposed to truth that is deleterious to their ideology they should probably stay out of this thread and preferably subforum.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:17

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 06:23

UCS Hellmaker: Mar 29, 2008; Toilet Rascal

Josef bugman posted:

Sorry, I am trying to say that "if something can be used for bad ends can it be an inherent good". I just thought I'd use a purposefully daft story so that it doesn't touch on something anyone would actually do.

No you made an argument that is inherently something used to make others agree with you based on emotions and fear of being attacked. Its inherently the exact problem that the OP is saying, that pushing ideology and use of bad faith arguments is one of the biggest issues that we currently are seeing in social media and other parts of the web. You intentionally choose something that was done in a way that will result in people agreeing with the point your attempting to make not by you being correct, but because your argument is intentionally flawed in order to produce the result you want.

It inherently is a large part of why this thread exists, to point out tactics used by bad faith actors in social media and teach people to be more critical in the information that they are reading and sharing.

# ? Apr 30, 2021 15:17

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