Josef bugman posted:

Allow me to quote the first paragraph of the first post of this thread:


Can you not see how this could be read, especially the bolded bits, as delineating the current situation of media literacy and disinformation from historic ones?

Literally Kermit posted:

Hitting “jump to last post” instead of reading hundreds of replies from your last unread post is a form of noise, isn’t it?

You miss out on all the derails but also possibly good posts as well.

quote:

Party officials recommended they settle the dispute with a coin toss.

A Clinton supporter correctly called “heads” on a quarter flipped in the air, and Clinton received a fifth delegate.

Similar situations were reported elsewhere, including at a precinct in Des Moines, at another precinct in Des Moines, in Newton, in West Branch and in Davenport. In all five situations, Clinton won the toss.

quote:

While it was hard to call a winner between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders last night, it’s easy to say who was luckier.

The race between the Democratic presidential hopefuls was so tight in the Iowa caucus Monday that in at least six precincts, the decision on awarding a county delegate came down to a coin toss. And Clinton won all six, media reports said.

quote:

The actual number of caucus precincts in which a coin flip helped decide the allocation of delegates is unknown and may remain unknown. And that means the impact those coin flips had on the final result of the razor-thin race between Sanders and Hillary Clinton is likely to remain unknown as well.

The Iowa Democratic Party told The Des Moines Register on Tuesday that seven coin flips were reported through the mobile app many caucus sites used to report results. It does not identify the precincts in which they occurred. Several more coin flips were identified by the Register through interviews, tips and social media.

It appears safe to say at this point that coin flips occurred in at least a dozen precincts, and that Clinton and Sanders won roughly an equal number of them.

quote:

If noise is introduced, then the received message contains certain distortions, certain errors, certain extraneous material, that would certainly lead one to say that the received message exhibits, because of the effects of the noise, an increased uncertainty. But if the uncertainty is increased, the information is increased, and this sounds as though the noise were beneficial!

It is generally true that when there is noise, the received signal exhibits greater information - or better, the received signal is selected out of a more varied set than is the transmitted signal. This is a situation which beautifully illustrates the semantic trap into which one can fall if he does not remember that "information" is used here with a special meaning that measures freedom of choice and hence uncertainty as to what choice has been made. It is therefore possible for the word information to have either good or bad connotations. Uncertainty which arises by virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is desirable uncertainty. Uncertainty which arises because of errors or because of the influence of noise is undesirable uncertainty.

It is thus clear where the joker is in saying that the received signal has more information. Some of this information is spurious and undesirable and has been introduced via the noise. To get the useful information in the received signal we must subtract out this spurious portion.

quote:

Five Key Questions of Media Literacy
1. Who created this message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
3. How might different people understand this message differently than me?
4. What values, lifestyles and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
5. Why is this message being sent?

Five Core Concepts
1. All media messages are ‘constructed.’
2. Media messages are constructed usinga creative language with its own rules.
3. Different people experience the same media message differently.
4. Media have embedded values and points of view.
5. Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power.

Ytlaya posted:

...no, the point is that facts on their own are meaningless, because the meaning derived from them is dependent upon a person's ideology/worldview (and its accompanying assumptions). People with bad assumptions can (and frequently do) end up coming to bad/wrong conclusions using technically-true information.

eviltastic posted:

[coinflips]

poo poo from 2013 posted:

I've been doing some thinking about various forms of idiocy (e.g. racism, sexism, conspiracy theories, and radical political leanings (right AND left) that tend to turn everything into Us and Them), and wondering why, in a time where information is so readily available, so many misguided individuals insist on hanging onto ignorance.

There have always been unpleasant people around. Anywhere you go, there's always "that guy" (or gal), who is obnoxious, disagreeable, hostile, or otherwise socially "broken" or crazy in some way. Note that I'm not using the word "crazy" here to denote any specific mental illness (or, necessarily, any diagnosable degree of mental illness at all). I'm using the word "crazy" in the casual sense which simply means that this person believes things that the majority of other people think are very obviously wrong and "how the hell could you think that?!"

In any case, that person typically learns that they must either change those aspects of themselves that turn other people off, or they must restrain them, mask them, or otherwise hide them. If they don't, they will have no friends.

Well...maybe not NO friends, but only a few who share the same brokenness, either in details or in spirit. In other words, if you're an rear end in a top hat, then you tend to tolerate others' assholery, either out of feelings of kinship, and/or from the realization that you can't afford to be too drat picky about your friends.

Either way, you and your buds are a small, isolated group and it's relatively easy for others to just avoid you when you start spouting off (and see you for what you are...broken and wrong).

But then the Internet came along. You can easily and fearlessly say whatever you want on the Internet. There certainly aren't any immediate consequences, and often there are no consequences at all. Read through any comment thread at the bottom of any major news story or article, and you'll quickly notice that unpleasant and/or crazy people come out of the woodwork.

Anyone who spends any significant amount of time on the Internet learns never to read anonymous comment threads of any length, because you'll inevitably read something mentally scarring and wish you'd never ventured down the rabbit hole.

The Internet is, in some ways, a very new twist on being subjected to others' unpleasantness. That being said, up until a few years ago, this didn't shake things up very much. Jerks spent a lot of energy being jerks, but things were still pretty much okay; you could easily avoid the spew by just avoiding jerky places on the Internet. Then things started to get weird...

Over the past decade or so, people have started to put more energy into harnessing the innate social potential of the Internet. There are now huge numbers of networking sites and forums and various means of easy interaction with thousands or even millions of people. These tools never existed before in the history of the human race. As social gathering becomes more and more specialized, and as awareness and use of Google and other search tools gains momentum, it's now very easy to connect with other people who believe...well...just about anything you can imagine.

Were you the one guy in your small town who believed that aliens regularly visit this planet, and that the government is hiding the evidence? Well, now you don't have to wonder if you're imagining things, or give up that belief, or worry about keeping it to yourself so people won't back away or point and laugh! Now you can instantly connect with hundreds of other crazy people who have thought about this a lot more than you have, and they will provide a ton of positive reinforcement for your belief in aliens and government conspiracies and a whole slew of other things at the same time! Look, they have pictures and graphs! It's PROOF! You're right!

And it's not just aliens. How about 9/11? That was a set-up you know--all smoke and mirrors. Hundreds (thousands?) of people will tell you so. Vaccines--you realize they're killing children with those things, right? Scientists who say otherwise are ignorant, or liars and part of the plot. Gays and lesbians? They're godless and should be put to death. Women's rights? Any men's rights activist will tell you that it's a calculated plot to keep those poor men down. (It all started with women's demands for silly things like the right to own property and vote, and look where we are now.) And don't even get me started on all of those various types of brown people who are making out like bandits and keeping all the upstanding white people from their rightful due. Oh, and Obama--how can you not see that he's obviously an alien. Or a Muslim. Perhaps even an alien-Muslim. You never know...

It was sort of painful to write that paragraph, but the point is this: Pretty much any horrible/stupid/messed-up thing that anyone can weave from stands of the finest bullshit already has it's own crazy echo chamber firmly established on the Internet. These places are quickly accessible to everyone who ever thought a crazy thought in their lives, and being a part of the group allows them to easily confirmation-bias their way past any and all doubt and rationality. Specialized social filters allow people to easily find and interact ONLY with people who already agree with them, and ignore anyone who doesn't. It's a organized social construct that focuses and concentrates the crazy. Facebook has just made the problem worse, and is a place where some crazy people only share the same half-dozen awful crazy ideas back and forth with other crazy people. They aren't forced to hear the dissenting opinions that they'd hear in daily life, since they can easily shape Facebook to give them only the comfortable feedback they want.

The result is that unpleasant people can now easily organize into large groups via the Internet, which gives their unpleasant views an unfortunate appearance of legitimacy through sheer numbers.

Do I have a solution? Nope. I'm just pointing out the issue, in the hope that greater awareness will allow others to do a few things:

1) Point out when someone is being cruel or dismissive of others.
Sometimes they don't intend to be cruel, and it may help. Often it won't, but at least you said something.

2) Point out when someone is ignoring facts, and learn to check facts yourself before passing others' ignorance along.

Wikipedia does NOT have the same legitimacy as an established scientific journal...but it's usually a halfway decent place to start. Snopes is a great site to double-check much of the idiocy that gets passed around the Internet over and over again. Please use it.

3) Realize that hatred usually arises from fear and pain.

It's difficult, but try to be sympathetic to those who are spreading abuse. That doesn't mean that you should agree with or support them; it only means that you should try to not respond with hatred or abuse yourself, and fan the flames. Even the worst of them aren't inhuman monsters, just broken human beings.

4) Don't react only to negativity. Recognize the positive!

When someone is kind, let them know. Point out when someone is supportive and trying to do the right thing, and encourage and help them! Do things yourself to support others. It doesn't matter what. Give blood. Volunteer time in a shelter. Help an old person across the street. Contribute to charities. Recognize when you've acted like a jerk, and apologize (and try really, really hard to not do it again, you jerk). Big things or little things--they all work to counterbalance organized ugliness.

aas Bandit posted:

TL; DR - A big part of this equation is that social media has simplified concentration and refinement of Stupid poo poo For Fringe People (and given those people a greater appearance of legitimacy). This enables unlikely poo poo like the election of a failed con-man to the highest office in the country.

Taffer posted:

Taffer posted:

What makes you uniquely qualified to speak on the "brokenness" of other people?

Taffer posted:

you never even confront the possibility that your own communities may be one of those.

Taffer posted:

What politician isn't a con artist?...Every time we vote we are getting conned.

Taffer posted:

Your constant assertion that They Are The Stupid People but that you are separate and above them is really gross and exposes your complete inability to see flaws in your own perspective.

Taffer posted:

Trump voters were idiots pulled in by a con man but... Biden voters weren't? What politician isn't a con artist? It is the job of every politician to make themselves universally liked, and to fool people into believing that they will get something out of voting that politician into office. If the only thing they get is warm fuzzies, they have been conned. Every time we vote we are getting conned. We are not better than the Trump voters. If anyone in this scenario has the moral high ground, it's the people who don't vote, because they realize there is no move that they can take that is not serving the interests of a con artist.

James Garfield posted:

The difference is that there is a logical argument for Trump voters being conned: some white Obama voters in dying rust belt towns thought he would do things to bring back jobs, but he didn't and just did generic Republican policies with even more racism. I'm not sure I agree that they were conned (unclear that thinking Trump would bring back jobs is actually why they voted Trump) but it's at least fact based and follows from the premises.

quote:

As far as I can tell, the full extent of the argument that Biden voters were cheated is "all politicians are equally bad but I am above it all because I am very smart".

quote:

Like Discendo Vox said in the OP, assuming that everything is equally bad just results in you throwing out everything that disagrees with your preconceptions, because it isn't possible to be equally skeptical of everything.

fool of sound posted:

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.

Discendo Vox posted:

That’s an advertisement excerpt from some jackass’s magic solutions book, leading with a cite to noted charlatan Nassim Taleb.

quote:

While it is too early to state whether the new coronavirus variant discovered by CCMB (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology) N440K, is the variant that is creating havoc in Visakhapatnam and other parts of the State, experts say the new prevalent variant, which is being called as the AP variant as it was first discovered in Kurnool, is at least 15 times more virulent than the earlier ones, and may be even stronger than the Indian variants of B1.617 and B1.618.

quote:

Divya Tej Sowpati, scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, and who closely works with genome sequencing of coronavirus said that the variant was closely related to the coronavirus lineage B.1.36 and had previously been linked to a spike in cases in several states of South India. "The defining mutation is N440K, a mutation that was known since last year and widely prevalent in Andhra Pradesh. When tested in cell culture studies, they appeared to spread quite quickly but that's not how it always plays out in the real world," he said in a phone conversation.

“N440K is slowly dying out and was fast being replaced by two other variants — B.1.1.7 and B.1.617 in almost all southern states including Kerala,” said Vinod Scaria, scientist at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi. The N440K had been associated with cases of reinfection in Delhi and possibly helped the coronavirus bind tighter to lung cells. B.1.1.7 and B.1.617 are the 'UK Variant' and the Indian variant, also known as the 'double mutant.'

quote:

“We are still to ascertain, which strain is in circulation right now, as samples have been sent to CCMB for analysis. But one thing is certain that the variant at present which is in circulation in Visakhapatnam is quite different from what we have seen during the first wave last year,” said District Collector V. Vinay Chand, who has been updated by senior doctors in the health department.

quote:

Confirming the enhanced power of the virus, District COVID Special Officer and Principal of Andhra Medical College P.V. Sudhakar said, “We have observed that the new variant has shorter incubation period and the progress of the disease is much rapid. In the earlier cases, a patient affected with the virus would take at least a week to reach the hypoxia or dyspnea stage. But in the present context, patients are reaching the serious condition stage within three or four days. And that is why there is heavy pressure on beds with oxygen or ICU beds,” he said.

quote:

Experts also point out that unlike during the first wave, a shorter exposure is enough to acquire the virus, which enables an infected person to infect four to five persons, within a shorter contact span.

“Most essentially, none is spared, as we have observed that it is affecting the younger population in a big way, including those who are fitness freaks and have high immunity levels. It is also observed that cytokine storm is occurring faster, and some are responding to treatment and some are not,” said Dr. Sudhakar.

quote:

According to the experts the bottomline is — this variant is highly unpredictable.

quote:

Radicalisation in the digital era
The use of the internet in 15 cases of terrorism and extremism

quote:

In Chapter 3 we learned that the internet allows individuals to seek material that they are interested in, and to reject that which does not support their worldview. The internet can give the illusion of strength of consensus in numbers and, as such, can act as a normalising agent (Bjelopera, 2011).

Several of our subjects helped to demonstrate this mechanism in operation. A1, A3, A5,A6, A10 and B2 all actively contributed to web forums that promoted the discussion of extremist topics. For B3, the intuitive strength of the internet is how it localises likeminded people, removing the sense “that it’s just you with these feelings”. In the offline world, we’ve already seen how A4 searched from mosque to mosque for a like-minded group, someone with whom to share his views. Having not found anyone, he took his search online.

A4 kept away from chat rooms, not willing to debate. His key word searches (see Annex A Figure A4) reveal that he went online primarily to gather information, rather than to engage.

A6, on the other hand, was willing to have his worldview tested. He welcomed debate online. If he found himself ignorant on a topic in a debate, he would go offline, learn more about that topic, and return to battle it out again. His online appearances dropped after such incidents, but he would return after a period of time (see the sometimes long gaps in A6’s online activity in Annex A Figure A6).

On the whole, however, most of the information recovered by the police and shared with the research team suggests that the convicted terrorists examined in this study were not generally looking at information that may have challenged their extremist beliefs.

quote:

The remains of a Chinese rocket that was hurtling back towards Earth have crashed into the Indian Ocean, the country's space agency says.

The bulk of the rocket was destroyed as it re-entered the atmosphere, but state media reported that debris landed just west of the Maldives on Sunday.

...

The Long March-5b vehicle re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 Beijing time (02:24 GMT) on Sunday, state media reported, citing the Chinese Manned Space Engineering office. There were no reports of injuries or damage.

It said debris from the 18-tonne rocket, one of the largest items in decades to have an undirected dive into the atmosphere, landed in the Indian Ocean at a point 72.47° East and 2.65° North.

axeil posted:

Here's a great example of how to ID bad/manipulative sources.

This is a tweet from the Hill posted at 11:13 AM EST today.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1391410890260496386

Note how its intended to evoke the emotion of fear (of the rocket landing on you) and also outrage/anger at China (for being so careless).

What's the one big thing the article is missing?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57045058


The fact the rocket had already crashed safely in the Indian Ocean 12 hours earlier. They explicitly ignored what had already happened so they could fear-monger and get people to rage-click.

This should be the prime example used of why The Hill is a very, very lovely source, to the point that I'd be in favor of banning posting their headlines/tweets entirely as they're explicitly designed to be misleading.

Jarmak posted:

Your time zone math is a little off there, the hill sucks but unless I'm missing something you're off by an AM.

Tweet is ~11am EST/ 4pm GMT

Impact is listed as 2:24 AM GMT the following day.

Piell posted:

https://twitter.com/US_SpaceCom/status/1391242693355835403?s=20

Jarmak posted:

Well maybe I'm the idiot, now I'm just confused.

Reflections85 posted:

I feel like I'm not following here. I think, previously you said you wanted to treat this evolutionarily, not revolutionarily. But we can delineate things even if we treat them as evolutionary.

E.g. We can distinguish between humans and chimpanzees even they both share a common ancestor and we can distinguish between different human ancestors, albeit the boundaries between any two can be blurry.

Media literacy could be much lower now than thirties years ago (deeply sceptical there), but that could still be evolutionary.

Could you give a brief explanation of how you would distinguish something as being revolutionary vs. evolutionary?

quote:

The issue became a rallying cry for Palestinians, who saw the moves as ethnic cleansing and illegal, and right-wing Israeli Jews, who said they were fighting for their property as landowners while also attempting to ensure Jewish control over East Jerusalem.

quote:

The march on Jerusalem Day, an annual event to mark the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war in 1967, is seen by Palestinians as a provocation. Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. Israel annexed it after 1967, a claim most of the world does not recognize

Discendo Vox posted:

The NYT change tracker is great, and it exists because the NYT is the most prominent not-obviously-trash outlet that constantly does this sort of fuckery, as well as a number of circular journalism tricks. Fox News and Politico and the Hill and any number of other outlets do this stuff to some extent, but it's remarkably common at the grey lady, and unusually outrageous. there's recent coverage of an interview question with mayoral candidate Andrew Yang that I may use to demonstrate circular reporting and framing effects.

Silver2195 posted:

What baffles me is the role of the headline writers. To begin with, their work gets read by a lot more people than the actual news stories, but they are, so far as I know, anonymous or at least obscure at most outlets. Has anyone ever actually written a plausible defense of this practice? Would the journalists writing the actual stories really do such a worse job of writing headlines?

(The cynical explanation, of course, is that the story-writers would use headlines that weren't clickbaity enough, and that the obscuring of responsibility by the use of anonymous or near-anonymous headline writers is, from a news outlet's perspective, a feature rather than a bug.)

Second of all, has anyone ever attempted to defend these kinds of headline/abstract changes, beyond wishy-washy generalizations? I can't help but wonder whether the responsible writers/editors are conscious of engaging in "spin" when they make changes like that.

BougieBitch posted:

In at least some of the cases above it matches a general "breaking news" practice of adding more details to the same story as things develop in the same day (sticking to the habits from their paper publications, they generally make a new article for developments on subsequent days). I imagine there's some practical or institutional limit to the length of headlines or abstracts, so the argument is basically that the newest information is often the most newsworthy and therefore needs to be added to the headline and abstract as more paragraphs are added to the article itself. Of course, when that conveniently removes important contextual information like "who started it", or "which side are the deaths on" they aren't held accountable because there's no one reviewing these decisions for systematic bias or anything, it's just "practical" to use the version of the headline that gets the most engagement

moths posted:

NYT had a push notification about the trampling in Israel that implied it was comparable to a Palestinian attack in scale.

They described the 47 trampling deaths as "Among the largest number of human-caused deaths" or something along those lines. The obvious implication being that fifty Israelites dying is more typical of rocket attacks or bombings.

I checked and yes, there was one attack that killed a similar number in the 70s.

quote:

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL2, the next level down. BSL2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment conducted in BSL2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.

Much of Dr. Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

“It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard — biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” says Dr. Ebright.

quote:

Much of Dr. Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”

quote:

“It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard — biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office — that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” says Dr. Ebright.

quote:

The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research.

“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,” Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.

quote:

The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.

quote:

The spike protein has two sub-units with different roles. The first, called S1, recognizes the virus’s target, a protein called angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (or ACE2) which studs the surface of cells lining the human airways. The second, S2, helps the virus, once anchored to the cell, to fuse with the cell’s membrane. After the virus’s outer membrane has coalesced with that of the stricken cell, the viral genome is injected into the cell, hijacks its protein-making machinery and forces it to generate new viruses.

But this invasion cannot begin until the S1 and S2 subunits have been cut apart. And there, right at the S1/S2 junction, is the furin cleavage site that ensures the spike protein will be cleaved in exactly the right place.

The virus, a model of economic design, does not carry its own cleaver. It relies on the cell to do the cleaving for it. Human cells have a protein cutting tool on their surface known as furin. Furin will cut any protein chain that carries its signature target cutting site. This is the sequence of amino acid units proline-arginine-arginine-alanine, or PRRA in the code that refers to each amino acid by a letter of the alphabet. PRRA is the amino acid sequence at the core of SARS2’s furin cleavage site.

Viruses have all kinds of clever tricks, so why does the furin cleavage site stand out? Because of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism.

quote:

How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? Either the site evolved naturally, or it was inserted by researchers at the S1/S2 junction in a gain-of-function experiment.

quote:

Consider natural origin first. Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination. Mutation is the process of random change in DNA (or RNA for coronaviruses) that usually results in one amino acid in a protein chain being switched for another. Many of these changes harm the virus but natural selection retains the few that do something useful. Mutation is the process by which the SARS1 spike protein gradually switched its preferred target cells from those of bats to civets, and then to humans.

Recombination is an inadvertent swapping of genomic material that occurs when two viruses happen to invade the same cell, and their progeny are assembled with bits and pieces of RNA belonging to the other. Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site.

Proponents of natural emergence say SARS2 could have picked up the site from some as yet unknown beta-coronavirus. But bat SARS-related beta-coronaviruses evidently don’t need a furin cleavage site to infect bat cells, so there’s no great likelihood that any in fact possesses one, and indeed none has been found so far.

The proponents’ next argument is that SARS2 acquired its furin cleavage site from people. A predecessor of SARS2 could have been circulating in the human population for months or years until at some point it acquired a furin cleavage site from human cells. It would then have been ready to break out as a pandemic.

If this is what happened, there should be traces in hospital surveillance records of the people infected by the slowly evolving virus. But none has so far come to light. According to the WHO report on the origins of the virus, the sentinel hospitals in Hubei province, home of Wuhan, routinely monitor influenza-like illnesses and “no evidence to suggest substantial SARSCoV-2 transmission in the months preceding the outbreak in December was observed.”

So it’s hard to explain how the SARS2 virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally, whether by mutation or recombination.

quote:

That leaves a gain-of-function experiment. For those who think SARS2 may have escaped from a lab, explaining the furin cleavage site is no problem at all. “Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2. “At least eleven gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

quote:

“Yes, but your wording makes this sound unlikely — viruses are specialists at unusual events,” is the riposte of David L. Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow who regards lab escape as a conspiracy theory. “Recombination is naturally very, very frequent in these viruses, there are recombination breakpoints in the spike protein and these codons appear unusual exactly because we’ve not sampled enough.”

Dr. Robertson is correct that evolution is always producing results that may seem unlikely but in fact are not. Viruses can generate untold numbers of variants but we see only the one-in-a-billion that natural selection picks for survival. But this argument could be pushed too far. For instance any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. And the numbers game can be played the other way. For the furin cleavage site to arise naturally in SARS2, a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed.

quote:

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Nor have other scientists stepped forward to raise the issue. Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the distribution system. And if you thought that Dr. Andersen and Dr. Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the 2nd and 3rd names on this list of recipients of an $82 million grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in August 2020.

The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese authorities: neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Dr. Shi’s coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the Chinese government says “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and on our territory too?” To which the US side might reply, “Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have this discussion in public?”

Dr. Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the Biden Administration in handling the Covid epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably, may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus’s origin, would be worth some probing. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such research would bear investigation. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?

quote:

Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump Administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of National Intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly.

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

Discendo Vox posted:

The essay literally alleges an international conspiracy.

Discendo Vox posted:

is pepsi ok posted:

The point then is to accept that all media is propaganda, and to follow that propaganda which furthers your goals.

is pepsi ok posted:

The point then is to accept that all media is propaganda, and to follow that propaganda which furthers your goals.

Silver2195 posted:

I agree with much of your post, but this is going way too far. You should at least make an effort to find the actual truth, even if you can never do so perfectly.

quote:

“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.

quote:

KEY POINTS:
The Treasury Department announced that it will require any transfer worth $10,000 or more to be reported to the IRS.

“Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion,” the Treasury said.

Investors have seen the value of bitcoin slide about 25% over the past month and talk of capitulation creep into online forums.

quote:

Still another significant concern is virtual currencies, which have grown to $2 trillion in market capitalization.58 Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion.59

This is why the President’s proposal includes additional resources for the IRS to address the growth of cryptoassets. Despite constituting a relatively small portion of business income today, cryptocurrency transactions are likely to rise in importance in the next decade, especially in the presence of a broad-based financial account reporting regime. Within the context of the new financial account reporting regime, cryptocurrencies and cryptoasset exchange accounts and payment service accounts that accept cryptocurrencies would be covered. Further, as with cash transactions, businesses that receive cryptoassets with a fair market value of more than $10,000 would also be reported on. Although cryptocurrency is a small share of current business transactions, such comprehensive reporting is necessary to minimize the incentives and opportunity to shift income out of the new information reporting regime.60

quote:

The Treasury Department’s release came as part of a broader announcement on the Biden administration’s efforts to crack down on tax evasion and promote better compliance. Among proposals officials are considering are bolstered IRS funding and technology, and more severe penalties for those who evade their obligations.

quote:

B. Increased Information Reporting
The second step in the compliance agenda involves shining light on opaque income streams, including proprietorship and partnership business income. Bolstering information reporting is regarded by the IRS and GAO as one of the best ways to increase the overall compliance rate,52 and existing empirical evidence confirms that introducing third party reporting requirements is effective.53

Previous changes to information reporting shed light on the significant potential of such efforts but also on pitfalls that can arise when reporting requirements are imprecisely designed. It is important to implement comprehensive information reporting regimes, as partial reforms can simply shift tax evasion into other areas.54 Further, financial institutions house a lot of valuable information, and indeed already provide third-party reports to the IRS. Leveraging this information—rather than introducing new requirements for taxpayers55—is a proven way to improve compliance.56

The President’s proposal requires information reporting on financial accounts to increase the visibility of gross receipts and expenses to the IRS. Today, business income is subject to limited information reporting. Current reporting of gross receipts exists for only certain types of revenue, and there is no information reporting on deductible expenses. This is why the tax gap for partnership, S-corporation, and proprietorship income is estimated at around $200 billion annually with the net misreporting percentage for certain income categories exceeding 50%.

Third party information reporting is already provided on primary income streams for the vast majority of Americans, such as wage, pension, and unemployment income. The President’s proposal would help make tax administration more equitable by subjecting financial flows, especially those that accrue disproportionately to those at the top of the income distribution, to third-party reporting as well.

The new reporting regime would build from the framework of the Form 1099-INT reports that taxpayers already receive from financial institutions when they earn more than $10 in interest from a bank, brokerage, or other financial institution. Financial institutions would simply report additional data on the financial accounts of these existing information returns. Specifically, the annual return would report gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts but carve out exceptions for accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold.57

Other accounts that are similarly situated to financial institution accounts would also be covered under this new reporting regime—for example, payment settlement entities would also be required to report gross receipts and gross purchases. The reporting regime would also cover foreign financial institutions and crypto asset exchanges and custodians.

These new reporting requirements would come with no additional reconciliation requirement for taxpayers. For already compliant taxpayers, the only effect of this regime is to provide easy access to summary information on financial accounts and to decrease the likelihood of costly “no fault” examinations once the IRS is able to better target its enforcement efforts. For noncompliant taxpayers, this regime would encourage voluntary compliance as evaders realize that the risk of evasion being detected has risen noticeably.

To arrive at a revenue estimate for the impact of a comprehensive information reporting regime, the Office of Tax Analysis began with an estimate of the tax gap for business income which included Schedule C proprietorship income, Schedule E rent and passthrough income, and small corporation income as well as the portion of the employment tax gap associated with business incomes. This tax gap estimate was then reduced to reflect the expected increase in voluntary compliance once taxpayers realize that the IRS has a lens into business income. The revenue estimate added two assumptions: first, a reduction in the steady state share of the tax gap due to increased voluntary compliance as taxpayers react to increased information reporting; and second, a gradual increase of voluntary compliance that phases in over time.

The revenue estimates assume that the bank reporting proposal will become effective for tax year 2023, building in implementation time for the IRS and for financial institutions. The Administration would concurrently seek out ways to reduce any new burden on financial institutions associated with this information reporting requirement.

This additional information reporting would also enhance the effectiveness of enforcement measures, as it will provide a proxy measure for a taxpayer’s potential income position, and suspect account flows could help the IRS better target its enforcement activities. This would benefit compliant taxpayers, whose risk of costly no-fault audits would decrease as the IRS better targets enforcement actions. According to the Office of Tax Analysis, the increase in compliance that would result from this new reporting regime is estimated to raise $460 billion over the next decade.

Challenges of Cash and Virtual Currencies
For a new information reporting regime to shed light on previously opaque income sources effectively, it is imperative to prevent business income from being shielded from reporting requirements. This is why the new Form 1099 reports would also be required from payment services providers so that businesses cannot shift out of traditional financial institutions to other kinds of platforms and avoid making their income visible to the IRS.

Another concern is that an information reporting regime will shift taxpayers toward a greater use of cash. Although information reporting may push some taxpayers to transact more in cash to avoid the reporting, it is unlikely that a substantial share of the business tax gap will move to cash-based transactions. Businesses already have incentives to use cash as much as possible to avoid detection via bank statements obtained in an audit, but there are practical barriers—such as security risks and the difficulty of spending large amounts of cash for certain transactions—to expanding the use of cash without depositing it in a bank account.