|
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... 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
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 14:54 |
|
|
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
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:Sincerely, it isn't. I am trying to make a point that something being true doesn't mean it can't be used for bad ends, and thought I'd use an over the top example. It's not a metaphor for the US healthcare system as some people in my PM's have asked, it's just a silly over the top example of how "If you just want something to be efficient that does not make it good". That and, as mentioned previously, I don't think intrinsic goods should be able to lead to bad things. I think your inherent assumption is that something being "inherently good" means that it cannot produce any kind of bad ends in any context whatsoever. I do not believe anyone shares that view of the meaning of inherently good. I do not believe there is anything that could qualify for the label of "inherently good" under that definition.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2021 15:27
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:Yeah, pretty much? How can something be intrinsically good if it leads to bad things? If your definition of a term means that it cannot possibly exist basically by definition, then you are probably using a bad definition of the term except in scientific or other unique circumstances that are not going to be relevant here. Josef bugman posted:Anyway, media stuff: The idea that media in the past was more trustworthy or less sensationalised or even more truthful does not seem to be accurate in my opinion. A prime example would be something like The Hillsborough Disaster. A case where following a tragedy large amounts of people in the media were unwilling to look for the truth and were more than happy to go along with things said by people in power. It took a push not by the media but by people on the ground in order to reject the lies seen there. This happened 32 years ago and this level of contempt for facts and truth seems to be just as prevalent then as now. You have a tendency towards black-or-white worldviews and it is showing here. "Here is a case where the old media was bad" is near-useless for a comparison of "better then or now". Assuming you're not claiming that the media is perfect in either circumstance, "here is a case of them doing badly" is useless because there should be such cases on the 'better' side.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2021 16:25
|
|
|
Red and Black posted:You’ve got it right. DV is essentially engaging in gatekeeping by saying only those within the news industry can offer a valid critique of it. It’s an attack that’s notably free of substance. the thing vox posted is that chomsky is outside the field; i.e. he is not an expert in the subject (he is a linguist). the critique he is offering is, specifically, that chomsky's work isn't very good and that the parts that are good have been done better by actual experts. that is a pretty standard criticism of "pop" books on subjects designed for a lay audience and written by a non-expert. that is common in, say, reviews of books on history: a book on history written by a non-expert for a popular audience could be good - but people who care about accuracy are often rightly suspicious until the book is vetted by experts. or pop psychology, or the like. further while vox's post is a rather generic criticism, it is at the only real level that could be offered because you didn't actually post anything that could be critiqued: merely "read this book, it is correct" and the only real response to that is "don't bother, it is not correct". if there are specific theories of his you want to post about, then there are responses that could be had to the theories and to discuss if or why further reading on the theories would be useful (or identify specific other authors/articles/books on the subject that would be more useful). like, if you post "guns germs and steel is a great book, go read it to understand everything about human history" a response of "that book is overly simplistic at best and has been harshly criticized by actual experts" is a perfectly complete response. if posted something discussing, say, diamond's theories on the impact of agriculture more specifically, then the discussion would be more about why those are wrong/simplistic/miss a key factor that impacts the analysis.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2021 16:18
|
|
|
joepinetree posted:But it wasn't a rebuttal to "MC offers little to no useful material," because that is a non-statement that can't be argued. It was a rebuttal to it being for "lay persons" from someone "outside the field." It is clear that people in the field don't think of Chomsky as being outside the field, and it is clear that, to criticize it or not, it is included in a number of academic curricula (and one of the syllabi is from a graduate seminar). I don't think my post in any way was an argument that the book is good. It was simply pointing out the absurdity of an appeal to authority about "fields" and lay persons that simply wasn't true. interestingly, this boring meta-argument is actually relevant to this thread in an odd way, even if it was touched off by someone just saying "read chomsky" and getting in short, the criticism of chomsky's work that was leveled is that he is not an expert in the field, and that his book is directed at lay audiences. the former is simple enough: a non-expert telling you things is less reliable than an expert telling you things. the fact that his work has been discussed in the field since then does not make him an expert - i read plenty of books in my college classes (a long time ago) that were on the syllabus to explain their impact, not because they were right. that said, of course, a non-expert can be right and an expert can be wrong: but it is a useful heuristic that you should be less trusting of a non-expert than an expert, and if you are going to take the time to read a book on something you may want to invest your time in works by the best-regarded experts - you do not, after all, have infinite time. the latter is getting glossed over and should not, because that's the part that's most relevant here. the problem of a book directed at lay audiences is in the incentives, and in the measurement of success. in short: the goal is to sell books to as many people as possible, and your success will be dictated by how well you sell books to as many people as possible. that introduces several biases. one is accessibility: the material needs to be intelligible to a layperson. that's mostly good - it forces you to refine your thinking and understand it better in order to explain it in a simpler way, without jargon. but it introduces a strong bias to simplify not only the explanation but the concepts as well, and that introduces a problem. for a complex subject, a popular book will tend to elide over the complex stuff that cannot be meaningfully explained to a layperson - but without making clear it is doing so, because a book that leaves the reader feeling they understand the subject will sell better than one that leaves the reader with further work to do. more problematically, however, it introduces a bias towards what readers will like as opposed to what is correct, malcom gladwell is a good example. much of his stuff is utter nonsense, that actual experts hold in complete disdain. but he's a very good storyteller and makes a reader feel they understand a subject and feel they have learned something, even though they haven't. and this is where the "accessibility" thing rears its ugly side: an accessible, but wrong, explanation will sell worse than one that is less accessible, but correct. further, it can lead to active biases against being correct: a book that is correct, but does not offer pleasing conclusions to the reader will sell more poorly than one that is incorrect but offers pleasing conclusions to the reader. ra-rah history books are perhaps the most obvious of these, but the problem is pervasive: the incentives in book-writing are not aligned with being correct, they are aligned with being popular. works aimed at other experts or to advance scholarship will have other biases - towards being correct, or at least not wrong (the two are not the same) at the expense of being useful to anyone but the author and a handful of other experts, for example. but given that they will rise and fall on their merits to a greater degree there is, at least, a greater pressure to being correct - and if they are not, other expert works will likely explain why. now, does this mean a popular book, or one directed at the public, is always wrong, always useless, etc? no, of course not. for one, it is often necessary to simplify concepts in a way that is wrong (but yet teaches you something useful) even to people intending to become experts. but if you simply say "read x book to understand this subject" it is a valid response to say "that's a book aimed at a lay audience" to make clear that no, it's not for understanding the subject, it is likely at best useful for an introduction to the subject. it is a consistent problem that people read introductory material, that dramatically oversimplifies things, and assume they understand it. my personal bugabear is people who took an econ 101 class and think that what they were taught in that class is how things work, instead of incredibly simplified models that have been deliberately simplified to eliminate any need for calculus in introductory classes, to just sort of illustrate a general concept. much in the same way molecules are not, in fact, hard balls with tubes connecting them to other molecules, except with even less intended connection to reality. but that's the thing about a popular book - people want to feel they understand the subject, they do not want to be told they need to understand calculus to even get the basics right, and they do not want to be told "these are really broad general concepts to illustrate things you need to think about, not How Things Work" now, at the end of the day, it matters if the underlying stuff is right or wrong - again, plenty of popular books on academic subjects have valuable insights. but this whole digression happened in response to someone who identified none of the underlying ideas they wanted to talk about - merely to recommend the book. you complain that the criticism was not detailed enough to point to specific ideas that were wrong - but of course it would be silly to do that when the ideas the poster wanted to discuss were not identified. instead, it was a "this is why that's not a useful use of your time, and you should look to other sources instead" which is a helpful and useful response to someone discussing reading a book (not exactly a one-minute affair) as opposed to a short article or the like. Red and Black posted:Does it? Here's an excerpt from the introduction, literally the first couple pages of the book: it should go without saying that a book (or any other work) that does not intend to do something, and indeed says that would be a mistake, can go right ahead and make that mistake anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 16:03
|
|
|
joepinetree posted:Like, funny thing: manufacturing consent is Chomsky's most assigned book: i spent a while thinking perhaps i just could not figure out how to find the syllabuses on this site because i hadn't had any coffee and was missing the obvious, but finally found this in the "about" section: quote:All shared syllabi are ‘private’ by default—they will not be available for display or download. But we are also building a public collection that we will make available for download. If you are willing to share on this basis, please put ‘public’ in the email subject line. so i do not think that anyone can meet that standard, because I think the site doesn't have that public collection yet! and even if it did, most would not be in it. however, in response to your argument from syllabuses: https://opensyllabus.org/result/author?id=Malcolm+Gladwell
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 16:21
|
|
|
It seems to be that there is a distinction between what the "propaganda model" purports to claim or prove, and how it is used in practice. It claims to show that what the media will focus on or report vs not report is affected by the media's interests. Call it american imperialism, whatever, who cares. The crux of the argument is that certain things will be reported, certain things not, certain things given emphasis, certain things not, and to the extent there is an editorial slant, it will be in one direction. Importantly, none of this purports to claim that it shows the media will lie. to take the "dead priest" example: it does not claim that the media will report a fake death of a priest in poland, nor report that there have been no deaths of priests in us client states. Instead it claims that one will be reported and/or given more emphasis, and one will not be reported and/or downplayed. Not reported is very different from "claimed did not occur" = for example, the new york times did not report on any of the myriad random hearings in the eastern district of new york bankruptcy court yesterday; but did not claim no such hearings occurred (or if no hearings did occur yesterday, the last time any did, I didn't bother to check because virtually nothing important ever happens there). So in essence the "propaganda model" may claim that a reader of the targeted media may be left with the wrong impression based on the implicit assumption that all newsworthy things were reported equally - but it does not appear to claim that the media will lie. All of that is not terribly meaningful and rarely relevant for evaluating a specific piece of media to determine its factual accuracy. It is relevant for reminding people that the availability heuristic (what you see is a reasonable slice of the world from which to extrapolate) frequently steers you wrong. It steers you wrong in much simpler, basic issues - like "it bleeds, it leads" and other aspects of media biasing what will be presented. However, in practice people use it to try and do precisely that: to disregard media that gives them facts they find unpleasant. for example, a facially valid use of the "propaganda model" might be to claim that the ongoing genocide against the Uighurs gets greater attention than other similar genocides due to whatever grab-bag of interests you want to point to. But in practice, the people who look to chomsky and the propaganda model use it to discredit the factual reporting to attempt to minimize or disregard the evidence of the ongoing genocide and claim it is not reliable - which is not what the model purports to allow you to do. In practice, it is simply used to provide a simple way to shunt undesired information away. A model that is consistently misused - even by its creators - is a bad model in practice even if the instruction on the box say not to misuse it in that way; if people given the model consistently misuse it, then find a better model that doesn't suffer from that. it is much the same as putting a warning label on the "eats small children and pets" peloton: you need to consider the real world and getting correct results, instead of slapping a blame-shifting warning label. I think that's what Vox was getting at when he says that all of the aspects of Chomsky's work that have validity are done better by other people. It is the correct approach for a model that has potentially useful insights, but is consistently misused: to take those insights and put them into a model that does not get consistently misused.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2021 18:08
|
|
|
Of course, to the extent anyone believes the Propaganda Model does offer a way to believe or disbelieve factual reporting or to evaluate its truthfulness (as opposed to simply evaluating what it will show vs not show, emphasize vs not emphasize), I struggle to think of a way that you could disprove it more significantly than its authors making three massive, indefensible, errors in claiming to disbelieve factual reporting. Not like, minor slips of the tongue, but "we believed firmly enough in our denial of these genocides to write a book about it."
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2021 18:17
|
|
|
Sekhem posted:You're repeatedly saying that it can't reliably make predictive claims, is unfalsifiable and can justify anything, etc. but I simply don't see how this is true. The PM, to me, clearly seems to provide falsifiable claims about what narrative framing and what level of attention are going to be given to current events in a statistically significant aggregate sense. MC makes very clear direct quantifiable metrics that could be used to assess these predictions, such as number of stories, their relative wordcounts, placement of such stories in the outlet's pages, frequency of use of particular terms and designations, etc. I think where I see the disconnect is what claims does the model make that anyone would ever care about? Let's just accept it as true. It is proven that the media will select what is reported and what is not, and what goes on page 1 vs what goes on page 13, based on "what promotes US imperialism." It's a silly claim, but we accept it as proven beyond a doubt, and then seek to use it. What does it tell us of any use? The overarching "whatever you're reading is slanted towards US imperialism"; ok, it's a model that produces only one result, indistinguishable from a flashcard with that result printed on both sides. It's not a model you use for things, it is a "proof", such as it is, and you just use the conclusion and never need to work through the model ever again. But remember, it only claims that in the aggregate, and based on what is reported/not reported, vs emphasized/not emphasized. So I guess you could conclude that you cannot and should not believe the information reported in the media is an unbiased sample of events in the world. But that's trivially true and this conclusion here adds very little compared to much better-known biases, like "if it bleeds it leads", "man bites dog", novelty, "does the story involve sex or scantily clad attractive people" and other well-understood biases that give specific events undue focus in the media that are far, far stronger than some amorphous general pursuit of american imperialism. If you are trying to predict which priest's death will be reported in the news - well, that's sort of an irrelevant prediction for most people. It's not clear what possible value it could have, and it slots well below the other biases. Ultimately, the reason it is used is to take that flashcard conclusion and misapply it - by claiming that the mainstream media is biased towards american imperialism in what it reports on and emphasizes, and then in practice completely drop that last part and use it as a generic "i choose not to believe this genocide" talisman. And it's not completely unreasonable for people to do so because people assume a model someone bothered to write a weighty book about must be useful in some way, so they assume the model produces any result that is useful rather than what is essentially pointless trivia - though, of course, they probably should have had second thoughts when they saw where the model was leading them, and double-checked. But the authors didn't, and thus wound up denying multiple genocides, and that's a little harder to charitably assume away as the result of a silly bias towards assuming the model must be useful because they know it's not. Again, that's all just assuming the model is correct, not even bothering to poke at it. There's no reason to poke at it because it doesn't really matter if it's right or wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2021 19:45
|
|
|
A Buttery Pastry posted:I mean, if you didn't dismiss it out of hand ("It's a silly claim"), it might have the use of making you question the narrative that ends up in newspapers in a way that makes you less open to US propaganda. The issue is that it still boils down to: who cares? The conclusion is the same: any media is not providing an unbiased sample of what occurs in the world, so try to avoid falling prey to the availability heuristic. That's just a basic fact of how to consume media, and the fact this offers another reason not to do it just adds a little bit of weight to an already-heavy pile. To the extent you try to do more (as you try to suggest in your first sentence) you are leading towards the precise error that I'm talking about that makes the "propaganda model" not useful - "question the narrative" and be "less open to US propaganda" falls into the "questioning the facts reported, not their selection or emphasis" that is a misapplication of the Propaganda Model (or, if you contend it's not, then you have the whole "consistently wrongly denying genocides" problem).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2021 20:12
|
|
|
Sekhem posted:You generally can't use any model of media analysis to establish the empirical facts of events. The PM is not unique in this regard. Media analysis can be very effective at pointing out deficiencies in a particular presentation of the facts, but it's alway going to require supplementation of some other method of research in order to cover for those inadequacies. The issue is the Propaganda Model cannot be used to point out deficiencies in a particular presentation of facts, if you are trying to use it in the broader sense that seeks to seperate it from the corresponding genocide denial. It instead seeks to claim a bias in the media's overall presentation of facts, not any particular article or set of articles. Either it is useful in reviewing the information on a specific event - such as a genocide, in which case the model's authors repeatedly denying genocides is directly on point - or it's not, in which case the model is not useful "at pointing out deficiencies in a particular presentation of the facts." The people promoting it have specifically sought to distance its use from the genocide denial, so I will accept their view of it as meaningless when applied to a perticular presentation of facts; but that means it's squarely in "so what" territory. Sekhem posted:Evilweasel invokes other models of understanding bias he thought are more explanatory - "man bites dog," "if it bleeds it leads" etc - but pretty much none of these would explain the disparity of reporting in the cases that MC discusses. Mass killings and political violence that are underreported or indifferently framed in mainstream media sources don't bleed any less or are any less novel than those which receive greater care and attention. You misunderstand my point. Those are more significant biases with respect to shaping what is or is not deemed newsworthy, and as a result of those significant biases existing any reasonable media consumer already should be aware that what is reported on does not match 1:1 with what happened. The Propaganda Model adds nothing to how you should review the media as a whole besides what you should have already learned (not assuming that because something was not reported, it did not happen). So in other words, "so what" - the conclusion if the model is true is what I'd already be doing, so why bother resolving if his claims are true or not.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2021 19:18
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:You guys know that Popper's falsifiability metric was created for scientific fields, right? It's not applicable to media criticism and analysis, it's like trying to eat soup with a fork. in the "trying to explain anything about observable reality" sense of "science", yes. if you are trying to say the propaganda model is a work of abstract art not intended to convey any explanation about anything that has happened or will happen, sure, you are correct that it need not be falsifiable any more than my toddler's art does. if you seek to be using it to explain anything about what is or is not reported in the media or how, then it needs to be falsifiable. because if it's not, by definition it doesn't explain anything or give you any insight at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 28, 2021 01:20
|
|
|
Red and Black posted:Nice evasion! I see you don’t have a response to the clear double standard applied with respect covering genocide. If the press had been “straight forward” with respect to Yemen they would have called it what it is: a genocide. there's two problems with your argument: first, as herstory begins now points out, the yemen reporting standing alone disproves the claims of the propaganda model (to the extent it's making claims that are disprovable, instead of using weasel concepts to always shift the explanation around the facts) second, you keep blindly asserting (with apparent disregard for what the yemen reporting actually was) that yemen and Xinjiang are covered in ways that are different enough to evade that the propaganda model has been falsified. given that the media coverage of yemen has been so great to effect political change, clearly it's not non-existent, so your claim must be that similar media organizations are covering them differently. so: are you able to point to some articles from the same source that you feel covers yemen and xinjiang differently in this way? because to date, you have simply blindly asserted it is so (while misrepresenting what has been reported on yemen) perhaps from the new york times or the washington post, the pre-eminent "mainstream media" newspapers in the united states
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2021 21:52
|
|
|
I will say "ok, maybe the media reported on yemen so extensively it forced a change in American policy, to the detriment of american imperialism, but that doesn't count and doesn't falsify the propaganda model because it was phrased slightly differently than the reporting on Xinjiang" is precisely the sort of thing that we are discussing by "the propaganda model is not falsifiable" where its predictions were badly wrong, there is significant wiggle room to always retract the lens to find some middling difference at some level of review and say that, that proves it; instead of "whoops, looks like it was wrong in major respects and, at a minimum, needs significant rework" it could be that it's just being misapplied in those cases and a fair review would show it had been falsified (qualified scientists talking about incontrovertibly falsifiable theories do, on occasion, get caught out doing that sort of thing) - but it is pretty much designed with all of these escape hatches where "oh, well, when the prediction was false that's just because of [non-useful excuse/weasel terminology]"
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2021 22:04
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 14:54 |
|
|
Red and Black posted:Why do you keep evading the question? You are being incredibly dishonest. I want to focus on the disparity in language because it refers to something simple and observable. Don’t agree that the disparity exists? Show that the media labeled Yemen a genocide. I do not believe that there is a real difference that you have identified between the reporting and do not plan on playing “I was thinking of something else” for ages. You were the one who brought up Yemen and claimed a big difference: point to what you are talking about clearly.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2021 22:56
|
|