Or alternately, the media has never strung two true words together in the history of the media, depending on your "angels on a pinhead" definition of "lying".
I disagree with Scott that laundering their made-up narratives through political partisans who can be counted on to give the appropriate quotes to support this pre-existing lie is in any way better than just writing the fiction directly. It's just lying with one extra step.
Scenario 1:
Journalist: Hur dur, I'm gonna write that the Hunter Biden laptop isn't a story its.......[shuffles deck] White supremacy! Wait, that might look weird since he's white. Russian disinformation? Let's roll with that!
Scenario 2:
Journalist: Hey Bill, I'm trying to spike this Hunter Biden story, can I quote you as an "anonymous national security official" saying it's your professional opinion that it's Russian Disinformation? Great! Thanks buddy! Hail Obama~!
Scott looks at those and says "see! They didn't technically lie in the second instance! They got someone to say the thing they wanted to say, so by the rules that I've just made up, it's not an untruth!"
A pretty good post from Scott. The title is a bit clickbaity and there are some minor quibbles with using the modern print Infowars of today compared to the Alex Jones podcast version of a few years ago, which is what most people imagine when you say "Infowars".
A lot of people are getting distracted by the title and either 1) thinking Scott is disputing the definition of "lie" and asserting that lies by omission are acceptable, or 2) thinking Scott is claiming we should always trust the media. Neither of these are the case. It's clear his goal is to attack the notion that "misinformation" is easily classified as such, when in reality it's closer to "different spin on the same basic facts". This is the same issue "fact checkers" ran into when they were in vogue a few years ago, with how many of their "fact checks" were actually "wokists have different opinions checks".
It's still annoying using a clickbait title and then accusing readers of misunderstanding when clickbait invites people to look for counterexamples. It's obvious he write the title to get views and generate discussion of people finding counterexamples. Smart marketing move on his part, because it allows other people to do the marketing when pointing out the counterexamples.
I feel the need to defend Scott here a little and say that, yes, while media manipulation is nauseatingly endemic (insert that "It's Media" meme image here), he is still probably right that the media, by and large, does not invent Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level fabrications. I mean, for Chrissakes, here he is, sampling InfoWars. InfoWars! The website where people's general understanding of the brand is "that show where Alex Jones claims that Satanist Democrat Lizardpeople are coming to take your guns and harvest your children for their adrenochrome."
And here's Scott, saying that even Alex Jones's website is not, technically, guilty of Protocols-ing, of making every single detail up whole-cloth, in spite of the above. The reality of what InfoWars et al do is both more sinister and yet somehow more boring than that: taking things that are trivially true and factual, but blowing them up disproportionately to the exclusion of even things that would falsify whatever story the outlet wants to tell you. I think the sad truth is that, for the human mind, narratives form most solidly around the brightest parts of a story, so whatever the media chooses to highlight will indeed carry the founder's effect for the rest of the facts of the story.
Sure, there are whoppers of stories that mislead the populace, and not all of them are from places as uncomely as InfoWars, but perhaps the reason why the media seems so unassailable is because they rarely ever say things they have absolutely no proof of.
I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts.
His isn't talking to you and his point isn't to trust media. He's talking to people who want to ban 'disinformation' and his point is that the way media lies already precludes any simple bright lines for that.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
At the very least it arms the audience he does have. That is, people who oppose censorship and read his piece will have a better understanding of this argument against it. And then upon encountering someone who is pro-censorship they can more lucidly argue the point and/or drop a link to this article.
To the extent that Scott is engaged in a crusade against censorship, his crusade has clearly failed. The epistemological problem presented by Media generally is a serious one, and while I have not read this article, none of Scott's previous work and none of the descriptions I'm seeing here indicate that he is capable of productively grappling with it.
In the Wheel Of Time series the Aei Sedia (a guild of sanctioned magic users) are bound always tell the truth via magical means. This is ostensibly done to convince non-magic users to trust them but in practice it has the opposite effect because due to this binding members of the Aei Sedia often become quite adept at word-games, lies by omission/implication, and using nitpicky technicalities to get around their "limitation". Of course, the normies notice this tendency and naturally come to trust the Aei Sedia even less.
Reading this along with Bounded Distrust I find myself wondering if Scott is being purposely obtuse as a means of currying favor with his ingroup (wealthy bay-area progressives), or genuinely doesn't grasp the above dynamic.
In a realistic world, there would be precisely worded, standardized, questions that would get asked of Aes Sedai any time a legal or similar situation came up, that had been vetted for loopholes and worked in the past.
In fact, Scott completely grasps the dynamic you describe. That's the whole point of his post! He says that while media sources aren't technically lying, they still are giving misleading impressions with their work. He isn't at all saying "these media organizations don't outright lie therefore they are trustworthy".
When I was in High School, I thought the Aes Sedai were oh-so-clever, but making the truth dance is still immoral even if you don't speak literal falsehoods. That journalists of all stripes continue playing this game is partly why I consider their moral development on par with teenagers'.
He isn't at all saying "these media organizations don't outright lie therefore they are trustworthy".
Ill admit that i stopped reading at the bottom of part II so if Scott turned it around later thats on me, but "these media organizations experts didn't outright lie therefore they are trustworthy" is pretty much tbe core thesis of Bounded Distrust and this article seemed like it was headed in the same general direction.
It's a bad title (or at least a title that is not aimed at the Motte users -- this post is clearly directed at people who are marginally pro-censorship). I went in thinking that's where Scott was going, but his point is that even Infowars mostly doesn't tell outright lies, and would-be censors' claim that they are merely fighting "truly fake news," rather than differences of opinion is full of shit. That their claims to objectivity are hollow.
This may seem obvious to many people here, but a large portion of Scott's audience (and probably an even larger portion of his peer group) honestly doesn't understand why we don't just ban all the obviously bad people because they're obviously and uncontrovertably bad. He's trying to nudge those people toward free speech without alienating them entirely.
Have you read Pact and/or Pale? Same limitation on magic users and magic creatures. Pretty much the same result, too, other than there is no issues with normies distrusting magic users because they do not know of them.
Do you know if there is any place I can get this as an epub? I tried googling it and I just find links to the guys website, im not interested in reading the whole thing online.
If you're fine with mobi files, you can get Pact from https://github.com/TheBrain0110/worm_scraper. Pale isn't on there, but the script would probably work on it too if you wanted to run it locally.
I started Pact but never finished it. Got about 100,000 words in and realized that I didn't really care about any of the characters or the world being crafted.
Pact, I think, was definitively the low point of wildbow's oeuvre, but he does have a certain signature trope that makes it particularly hard to care for his protagonists. (I read through all of Worm and Pact, and got pretty far through Twig whose worldbuilding I loved but which made me do a hard "not this shit again" drop when the trope in question reared its head again. It would probably be good if it's the first of his stories you read.)
(I'm talking about how his protagonists inevitably slide into inhumanity and outright non-sapience over the course of the plot.)
Yah that bothers me too. While I quite enjoyed Worm, Pact felt like it was emphasizing all the elements i disliked in Worm (see your spoiler) while minimizing the elements I enjoyed.
Weapons of mass destruction!!! Weapons of mass destruction!!!
"We're winning the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, just give us another few hundred billion and thousands more troops!"
Trillions squandered, thousands of our people dead, hundreds of thousands of their people dead, Middle East wrecked/hates us, oil prices up, liberties weakened, ISIS.
Why did the North Koreans decide to go nuclear, damn the consequences? Who created the precedent that you can invade a country via some ad hoc principle you just invented like 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'pre-emptive war', a concept that looks like it's bouncing back on us in the form of the 'special military operation' and maybe a 'rebellious province reunification campaign' coming up?
If we were going to burn the 'international law' card we spent such a long time building up, let's attack potential threats while they're still weak, not bayonet-charge a pinata full of hand grenades.
Maybe it wasn't Scott's definition of lying in that the media knew it to be false. The problem was that they didn't know anything, that they were uncritically repeating US govt talking points as though they were true. But the lie is so massive in scale, so massive in consequences! What is the point of having a democracy if the government just tells the media what to say to the people, so the people re-elect the government who continue on with their pre-chosen policies? Of if we the people really put our foot down we install another party who continue with the pre-designated policies anyway (until there's an elite consensus to move on)! It's a completely dysfunctional system, a dictatorship without the dynamism.
Technically the Iraq government did have weapons of mass destruction, in that they had old chemical weapons. And that's exactly Scott's point- the media can imply something totally different than what they're technically saying with certain wording, or do a motte and bailey where they say "We know this 1 fact for sure" and it's something moderate but then also say "Here's our opinion on what may also be happening" and it's something crazy. And the crazy part is what's in the headline.
So if you're strategy to prevent another "Weapons of mass destruction" disinfo being disseminated is just to shut down anyone who's caught in a hard lie, you'll fail. You need a more nuanced strategy of catching people who spread disinfo, and a better strategy of making sure accurate info spreads.
The media might not know whether something is true or not but they certainly transmitted the lies of others to great effect:
There's a whole list of Bush-era flat-out lies here. Bush said Iraq had biological weapons, that there was uncertainty as to whether they had nuclear weapons (when intelligence concluded that they couldn't have a bomb before 2007-8), they lied that the infamous aluminium tubes were only suitable for nuclear weapons, the ridiculous Hussein/Al-Qaeda connection.
It'd also help if we shut down the liars who pretended Afghanistan was a successful operation, or on the verge of success. By 2010 it was pretty clear to those in the know that things were going badly, there were internal reports where they said it was a complete mess. Yet we stuck around for another 12 years because they lied about it. The trouble is that those verity-dodgers were and still are leading our militaries.
Even though punishing the liars isn't a complete solution, it is at least a good start. We don't need to wait for a perfect level of rationalism and idealized truth-telling, we can start by punishing people who blatantly lie and cause vast destruction. We could also punish the credulous media that transmits these lies uncritically. The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
"I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts."
He made (at least part of) his point in this piece. It isn't "the media never lies therefore you can totally trust them." His point is "honesty is a gradient such that it's possible to be partially dishonest but not outright lying. Dishonesty in the media is subtle and ambiguous. This makes it impossible to make unambiguous censorship rules which are both effective at handling misinformation and impossible to abuse".
The media is dishonest in subtle ways without lying, therefore preventing misinformation is much harder than simply censoring/punishing lies. But censoring/punishing editorializing probably goes too far and prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
This would be a problem... if there were any meaningful discourse occuring in the mainstream media.
Do you see such discourse taking place? Where?
But yes, the point that you can't readily sort objective truth out of the current information environment and then force all media to conform to such truth is quite accurate.
My point is that Scott is being charitable in saying the media "almost never lies" whereas I would say "the media lies constantly but has evolved to lie in ways that they won't be punished for."
And because they aren't punished in the slightest for these lies, they continue to espouse them, in an incredibly systematic way.
I think this is just a disagreement of semantics: you and he are using slightly different definitions for the word "lie". You are using it to include any form of dishonesty, or at least the forms the media uses, while Scott is using it to mean literal false statements of fact which are objectively disprovable.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or elide facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
I'm not so sure. I'm leaning more toward Scott's assessment that this isn't lying, as in knowingly transmitting false information. I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.
What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?
Given how people communicate around me, I'm not sure. It often feels that when people talk about politics around me, they often reuse the same rhetorical techniques they heard on a show without much thought. But I'm not sure they're doing it all consciously.
What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?
In my experience (as a former journalist) it usually starts off with the latter and morphs into the former if you aren't vigilant (which is why it is better to just not do any of it.) It starts off with you reading some moron on social media explain things exactly backwards or in some other bizarrely stupid fashion, and so you write an article explaining how things really went down, and you use emotive language to drive home how right you are. Then your article, which is full of slams against the outgroup, gets retweeted by your colleagues and maybe a big name retweets it! Plus your boss loves it and so do all of your friends! Depending on how much you have dealt with popularity already, it can go one of two* ways - it either overwhelms you immediately and you instantly begin writing for more retweets, or you marinade in it and stick to what you were doing, and over time - as the depression endemic with being a truth teller in a post truth world blossoms and grows - subconsciously your brain recognises that you are less unhappy when you write the party line, and then you begin writing for more retweets. I'm not sure which is worse - the instant party slave has desperation behind them, but the boiled frog has had time to rationalise and justify everything she's done.
*There is a third route of course - due to broken brains and a prior surplus of popularity you don't give a shit about praise from anyone who isn't your dad, and so all the praise you get for your slam article makes you ashamed of it and yourself for writing it and you resolve to never do it again and you put way too much effort into making every article give as many facts as possible, and your commissions slowly dry up as your dry and informative articles are pushed aside by bombastic partisan bullshit. Eventually you quit and end up writing puns to annoy smart people in debate forums and working at a farmer's market, and you find you are infinitely happier than you were when every day meant grappling with a choice between sticking to your principles or being good at your job.
I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.
I'm at least partially influenced by my legal background. You know how when a witness is sworn in they are giving an oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
If a witness is asked a question and intentionally omits relevant information, especially if they are pressed on the point, that does in fact constitute perjury. The whole point of witness testimony is to elicit all the truthful information about a situation, and omitting relevant information that one believes to be true is lying under oath. As can be embellishing the facts.
So when I hear mainstream media talking heads using artful or evasive phrasing when describing an event, it immediately turns on my "cross examination" sense.
But hey, newspaper stories and TV reports aren't under oath so perhaps the comparison is strained.
Sounds like you're noticing the fallacious nature of much reporting, where explicit or implied conclusions simply don't logically follow from stated premises and the actual informational content of the report is diluted to the point its useless. The noise drowns out the signal. Which may be less about deceit and more about catering to an audience.
Which brings up:
how much of this type of communication is done consciously?
Simplest explanation is that they understand that their paycheck depends on them espousing a particular viewpoint to the audience that supports them and they adjust accordingly.
I read a comment a long time ago during the Obama years that elucidated this for me. Basically, imagine you're Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity and you KNOW your job hinges on telling your audience that Obama is the antichrist.
And one day the report comes out that Obama rescued a drowning puppy and gave it CPR to revive it. There's photos, videos, and gushing eyewitness testimony. It is all very heroic.
Does this mean you have to change your message that night? No. You just sigh, go on the air, and figure some way to spin it to say this just PROVES Obama is Satanic. You have to, it's what you do.
Switch out whichever media personalities and politicians you want, that applies across the board.
And the same thing applies. Somewhat less obviously, with reporters. Across the board.
They have a job, not principles. And that job depends on maintaining an audience.
But aren't there a bunch of mechanisms in court for masking out information that colors the opinions of the jurors without being in fact pertinent to the precise questions asked? Ie. witnesses are supposed to answer completely, but they're specifically not supposed to give information that would suggest inferences that they don't have direct knowledge of? It seems to me that inasmuch as the media lies, it is in good part with additional information that would be struck in court - too much truth, rather than not enough.
(Sadly, there is no Media Judge to strike paragraphs for hearsay.)
Yes, and there's no opposing attorney to object to irrelevant testimony or to cross-examine and impeach the witness by catching them in a contradiction or revealing a "hidden" motive to lie.
It's all very frustrating for someone who is used to being able to directly attack seeming false or evasive answers on the spot, with a witness who cannot escape the questioning or shout you down.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Most people aren't going to be as competent and trained in argumentation to spot these evasions but a big problem our society has is that even our "elites" can't spot them when the evasions are done as long as they're being done for reasons the NYT would support.
Implicitly their epistemology is "believe the implication of the NYT - don't look for the missing factual content or added non-factual content".
Very few people can reason out an epistemology on their own - most need to be educated in it. At the very least almost everyone needs to read about it and to do that one would have to find the right reading material. This means there's a lot of power in getting to set the ground rules of evaluating claims and installing a faulty epistemology - look at wikipedia and how it launders progressive claims through the "reliable sources" rule. The wikipedia rules are rules for deciding what should get printed on the site which implicitly makes them rules about discerning truth.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Strong agree.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
Yeah, it seems like the goal is to get the average person, or at least the average voter, to completely outsource their beliefs about the world beyond their immediate surroundings to """trusted""" third parties... whilst also ensuring that those third parties are never accountable for getting any given report wrong, or ignoring a relevant story, or even outright spinning or modifying the facts on occasion.
This is perhaps where the comparison to religious faith becomes most apt. Rather than perceiving/divining the 'truth' themselves, the people are expected to accept the church's edicts and bring any queries one has to the priests who can sort things right out and possibly punish nonbelievers.
At which point, the only factual disputes that may be permitted are interdenominational ones.
I’m skeptical of his methodology because the usual pattern for the media lying is to do so on air, rather than in print articles. The articles on the infowars website are just a biased news source; most of the infamous and or ridiculous lies were uttered on his radio program. And, say, Rittenhouse or the Covington Catholic kids had lies told about them… mostly on air or in op Ed’s, not on the front pages of the NYT.
komm-nach-unteralterbach
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1yr ago
Richard Nixon also very rarely lied as president. And according to all available evidence, my former neighbor's ex-fiancee who was cheered on by her "friends" to get drunker than usual and swallow a stripper's cock at her bachelorette party (guiltily admitting it a few days later) very rarely lied in her relationship. 5-10 HIPAA violations in a 10 or 20 year medical career is a rare pattern of lying. (And to jump categories, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold only very rarely shot people.)
Of course I actually read the article and realize that the above is not the point of it at all, but I just thought it'd be worth pointing out that it often does not practically exonerate a liar at all for them to have lied (explicitly or otherwise as the article highlights) only "very rarely".
NYT only doesn't lie so that when they do it has the maximum chance of being believed when they do - a problem which is not unique to NYT but is shared by everyone who explicitly or implicitly has a utilitarian ethical framework.
This is false and a cheap trick for gaining attentional emphasis.
Of course it is a truism to understand that medias often use omissions and quantifier alteration.
It might be more frequent than straight lies however the media do lies often about basic facts and as such it is not rare let alone very rare.
A common straight lie for example is to claim that there is no scientific evidence about something or to claim there is a single and consensual scientific voice about something.
Those straights lies (just one example among many) are very frequent and potent.
There's also the tactic by media supporters of having different standards for literal truth.
"We didn't literally mean there's absoluitely no scientific evidence for it. We meant that there's no good scientific evidence that has been published in Nature."
Of course, this is a one way ratchet. If the media said X, but means Y, and X is false, we're supposed to ignore the literal falsity of X. But if Y is false, we're supposed to do the opposite and ignore the falsity, taking X literally instead.
greyenlightenment
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1yr ago
It's lying through omission or embellishment. Like failing to disclose the race of a murder suspect, or taking quotes out of context. A favorite technique is to interview a lot of people and then cherry-pick the most salacious quote as part of the title as somehow being representative of everyone interviewed .
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Or alternately, the media has never strung two true words together in the history of the media, depending on your "angels on a pinhead" definition of "lying".
I disagree with Scott that laundering their made-up narratives through political partisans who can be counted on to give the appropriate quotes to support this pre-existing lie is in any way better than just writing the fiction directly. It's just lying with one extra step.
Scenario 1:
Journalist: Hur dur, I'm gonna write that the Hunter Biden laptop isn't a story its.......[shuffles deck] White supremacy! Wait, that might look weird since he's white. Russian disinformation? Let's roll with that!
Scenario 2:
Journalist: Hey Bill, I'm trying to spike this Hunter Biden story, can I quote you as an "anonymous national security official" saying it's your professional opinion that it's Russian Disinformation? Great! Thanks buddy! Hail Obama~!
Scott looks at those and says "see! They didn't technically lie in the second instance! They got someone to say the thing they wanted to say, so by the rules that I've just made up, it's not an untruth!"
And I say they're the same picture.
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A pretty good post from Scott. The title is a bit clickbaity and there are some minor quibbles with using the modern print Infowars of today compared to the Alex Jones podcast version of a few years ago, which is what most people imagine when you say "Infowars".
A lot of people are getting distracted by the title and either 1) thinking Scott is disputing the definition of "lie" and asserting that lies by omission are acceptable, or 2) thinking Scott is claiming we should always trust the media. Neither of these are the case. It's clear his goal is to attack the notion that "misinformation" is easily classified as such, when in reality it's closer to "different spin on the same basic facts". This is the same issue "fact checkers" ran into when they were in vogue a few years ago, with how many of their "fact checks" were actually "wokists have different opinions checks".
It's still annoying using a clickbait title and then accusing readers of misunderstanding when clickbait invites people to look for counterexamples. It's obvious he write the title to get views and generate discussion of people finding counterexamples. Smart marketing move on his part, because it allows other people to do the marketing when pointing out the counterexamples.
Yeah, the clickbait title is kind of silly, and it would be better if it was something like "The Media Rarely Outright Lies".
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I feel the need to defend Scott here a little and say that, yes, while media manipulation is nauseatingly endemic (insert that "It's Media" meme image here), he is still probably right that the media, by and large, does not invent Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level fabrications. I mean, for Chrissakes, here he is, sampling InfoWars. InfoWars! The website where people's general understanding of the brand is "that show where Alex Jones claims that Satanist Democrat Lizardpeople are coming to take your guns and harvest your children for their adrenochrome."
And here's Scott, saying that even Alex Jones's website is not, technically, guilty of Protocols-ing, of making every single detail up whole-cloth, in spite of the above. The reality of what InfoWars et al do is both more sinister and yet somehow more boring than that: taking things that are trivially true and factual, but blowing them up disproportionately to the exclusion of even things that would falsify whatever story the outlet wants to tell you. I think the sad truth is that, for the human mind, narratives form most solidly around the brightest parts of a story, so whatever the media chooses to highlight will indeed carry the founder's effect for the rest of the facts of the story.
Sure, there are whoppers of stories that mislead the populace, and not all of them are from places as uncomely as InfoWars, but perhaps the reason why the media seems so unassailable is because they rarely ever say things they have absolutely no proof of.
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What does Scott aim to achieve with this series of articles?
Let it be known that its irrational to distrust media 100% of the time when they tell the truth 99% of the time?
Im sorry Scott, but I dont need the media to tell me the weather, I can look outside or use alternative methods to figure out indisputeable facts.
If you are a liar at the margins, you are useless to me, Im here for the 1%, the margins, the edges of our bounds are what matters, not the mundane.
He literally states his goal in the article:
His isn't talking to you and his point isn't to trust media. He's talking to people who want to ban 'disinformation' and his point is that the way media lies already precludes any simple bright lines for that.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
At the very least it arms the audience he does have. That is, people who oppose censorship and read his piece will have a better understanding of this argument against it. And then upon encountering someone who is pro-censorship they can more lucidly argue the point and/or drop a link to this article.
To the extent that Scott is engaged in a crusade against censorship, his crusade has clearly failed. The epistemological problem presented by Media generally is a serious one, and while I have not read this article, none of Scott's previous work and none of the descriptions I'm seeing here indicate that he is capable of productively grappling with it.
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In the Wheel Of Time series the Aei Sedia (a guild of sanctioned magic users) are bound always tell the truth via magical means. This is ostensibly done to convince non-magic users to trust them but in practice it has the opposite effect because due to this binding members of the Aei Sedia often become quite adept at word-games, lies by omission/implication, and using nitpicky technicalities to get around their "limitation". Of course, the normies notice this tendency and naturally come to trust the Aei Sedia even less.
Reading this along with Bounded Distrust I find myself wondering if Scott is being purposely obtuse as a means of currying favor with his ingroup (wealthy bay-area progressives), or genuinely doesn't grasp the above dynamic.
In a realistic world, there would be precisely worded, standardized, questions that would get asked of Aes Sedai any time a legal or similar situation came up, that had been vetted for loopholes and worked in the past.
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In fact, Scott completely grasps the dynamic you describe. That's the whole point of his post! He says that while media sources aren't technically lying, they still are giving misleading impressions with their work. He isn't at all saying "these media organizations don't outright lie therefore they are trustworthy".
When I was in High School, I thought the Aes Sedai were oh-so-clever, but making the truth dance is still immoral even if you don't speak literal falsehoods. That journalists of all stripes continue playing this game is partly why I consider their moral development on par with teenagers'.
Oh, for sure. I don't think Robert Jordan intended the Aes Sedai to be moral role models.
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Ill admit that i stopped reading at the bottom of part II so if Scott turned it around later thats on me, but "these
media organizationsexperts didn't outright lie therefore they are trustworthy" is pretty much tbe core thesis of Bounded Distrust and this article seemed like it was headed in the same general direction.It's a bad title (or at least a title that is not aimed at the Motte users -- this post is clearly directed at people who are marginally pro-censorship). I went in thinking that's where Scott was going, but his point is that even Infowars mostly doesn't tell outright lies, and would-be censors' claim that they are merely fighting "truly fake news," rather than differences of opinion is full of shit. That their claims to objectivity are hollow.
This may seem obvious to many people here, but a large portion of Scott's audience (and probably an even larger portion of his peer group) honestly doesn't understand why we don't just ban all the obviously bad people because they're obviously and uncontrovertably bad. He's trying to nudge those people toward free speech without alienating them entirely.
Fair and I suppose that's on me for not reading the whole thing. I should've given him more credit than I did.
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Have you read Pact and/or Pale? Same limitation on magic users and magic creatures. Pretty much the same result, too, other than there is no issues with normies distrusting magic users because they do not know of them.
Do you know if there is any place I can get this as an epub? I tried googling it and I just find links to the guys website, im not interested in reading the whole thing online.
If you're fine with mobi files, you can get Pact from https://github.com/TheBrain0110/worm_scraper. Pale isn't on there, but the script would probably work on it too if you wanted to run it locally.
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I started Pact but never finished it. Got about 100,000 words in and realized that I didn't really care about any of the characters or the world being crafted.
Pact, I think, was definitively the low point of wildbow's oeuvre, but he does have a certain signature trope that makes it particularly hard to care for his protagonists. (I read through all of Worm and Pact, and got pretty far through Twig whose worldbuilding I loved but which made me do a hard "not this shit again" drop when the trope in question reared its head again. It would probably be good if it's the first of his stories you read.)
(I'm talking abouthow his protagonists inevitably slide into inhumanity and outright non-sapience over the course of the plot .)
@HlynkaGC, too.
Pale is doing a very good job of not taking that path, even while laying out why it might be a desirable option for some of the protagonists.
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Yah that bothers me too. While I quite enjoyed Worm, Pact felt like it was emphasizing all the elements i disliked in Worm (see your spoiler) while minimizing the elements I enjoyed.
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Weapons of mass destruction!!! Weapons of mass destruction!!!
"We're winning the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, just give us another few hundred billion and thousands more troops!"
Trillions squandered, thousands of our people dead, hundreds of thousands of their people dead, Middle East wrecked/hates us, oil prices up, liberties weakened, ISIS.
Why did the North Koreans decide to go nuclear, damn the consequences? Who created the precedent that you can invade a country via some ad hoc principle you just invented like 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'pre-emptive war', a concept that looks like it's bouncing back on us in the form of the 'special military operation' and maybe a 'rebellious province reunification campaign' coming up?
If we were going to burn the 'international law' card we spent such a long time building up, let's attack potential threats while they're still weak, not bayonet-charge a pinata full of hand grenades.
Maybe it wasn't Scott's definition of lying in that the media knew it to be false. The problem was that they didn't know anything, that they were uncritically repeating US govt talking points as though they were true. But the lie is so massive in scale, so massive in consequences! What is the point of having a democracy if the government just tells the media what to say to the people, so the people re-elect the government who continue on with their pre-chosen policies? Of if we the people really put our foot down we install another party who continue with the pre-designated policies anyway (until there's an elite consensus to move on)! It's a completely dysfunctional system, a dictatorship without the dynamism.
Technically the Iraq government did have weapons of mass destruction, in that they had old chemical weapons. And that's exactly Scott's point- the media can imply something totally different than what they're technically saying with certain wording, or do a motte and bailey where they say "We know this 1 fact for sure" and it's something moderate but then also say "Here's our opinion on what may also be happening" and it's something crazy. And the crazy part is what's in the headline.
So if you're strategy to prevent another "Weapons of mass destruction" disinfo being disseminated is just to shut down anyone who's caught in a hard lie, you'll fail. You need a more nuanced strategy of catching people who spread disinfo, and a better strategy of making sure accurate info spreads.
The media might not know whether something is true or not but they certainly transmitted the lies of others to great effect:
There's a whole list of Bush-era flat-out lies here. Bush said Iraq had biological weapons, that there was uncertainty as to whether they had nuclear weapons (when intelligence concluded that they couldn't have a bomb before 2007-8), they lied that the infamous aluminium tubes were only suitable for nuclear weapons, the ridiculous Hussein/Al-Qaeda connection.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/20/18274228/ari-fleischer-iraq-lies-george-w-bush-wmds
It'd also help if we shut down the liars who pretended Afghanistan was a successful operation, or on the verge of success. By 2010 it was pretty clear to those in the know that things were going badly, there were internal reports where they said it was a complete mess. Yet we stuck around for another 12 years because they lied about it. The trouble is that those verity-dodgers were and still are leading our militaries.
Even though punishing the liars isn't a complete solution, it is at least a good start. We don't need to wait for a perfect level of rationalism and idealized truth-telling, we can start by punishing people who blatantly lie and cause vast destruction. We could also punish the credulous media that transmits these lies uncritically. The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
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I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
He made (at least part of) his point in this piece. It isn't "the media never lies therefore you can totally trust them." His point is "honesty is a gradient such that it's possible to be partially dishonest but not outright lying. Dishonesty in the media is subtle and ambiguous. This makes it impossible to make unambiguous censorship rules which are both effective at handling misinformation and impossible to abuse".
The media is dishonest in subtle ways without lying, therefore preventing misinformation is much harder than simply censoring/punishing lies. But censoring/punishing editorializing probably goes too far and prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
This would be a problem... if there were any meaningful discourse occuring in the mainstream media.
Do you see such discourse taking place? Where?
But yes, the point that you can't readily sort objective truth out of the current information environment and then force all media to conform to such truth is quite accurate.
My point is that Scott is being charitable in saying the media "almost never lies" whereas I would say "the media lies constantly but has evolved to lie in ways that they won't be punished for."
And because they aren't punished in the slightest for these lies, they continue to espouse them, in an incredibly systematic way.
I think this is just a disagreement of semantics: you and he are using slightly different definitions for the word "lie". You are using it to include any form of dishonesty, or at least the forms the media uses, while Scott is using it to mean literal false statements of fact which are objectively disprovable.
Yes, and as per my initial comment, it'd be nice if he had explicitly laid out his definition of 'lie.'
That's the missing context I'd really like to be added in.
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I'm not so sure. I'm leaning more toward Scott's assessment that this isn't lying, as in knowingly transmitting false information. I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.
What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?
Given how people communicate around me, I'm not sure. It often feels that when people talk about politics around me, they often reuse the same rhetorical techniques they heard on a show without much thought. But I'm not sure they're doing it all consciously.
In my experience (as a former journalist) it usually starts off with the latter and morphs into the former if you aren't vigilant (which is why it is better to just not do any of it.) It starts off with you reading some moron on social media explain things exactly backwards or in some other bizarrely stupid fashion, and so you write an article explaining how things really went down, and you use emotive language to drive home how right you are. Then your article, which is full of slams against the outgroup, gets retweeted by your colleagues and maybe a big name retweets it! Plus your boss loves it and so do all of your friends! Depending on how much you have dealt with popularity already, it can go one of two* ways - it either overwhelms you immediately and you instantly begin writing for more retweets, or you marinade in it and stick to what you were doing, and over time - as the depression endemic with being a truth teller in a post truth world blossoms and grows - subconsciously your brain recognises that you are less unhappy when you write the party line, and then you begin writing for more retweets. I'm not sure which is worse - the instant party slave has desperation behind them, but the boiled frog has had time to rationalise and justify everything she's done.
*There is a third route of course - due to broken brains and a prior surplus of popularity you don't give a shit about praise from anyone who isn't your dad, and so all the praise you get for your slam article makes you ashamed of it and yourself for writing it and you resolve to never do it again and you put way too much effort into making every article give as many facts as possible, and your commissions slowly dry up as your dry and informative articles are pushed aside by bombastic partisan bullshit. Eventually you quit and end up writing puns to annoy smart people in debate forums and working at a farmer's market, and you find you are infinitely happier than you were when every day meant grappling with a choice between sticking to your principles or being good at your job.
...That third route sounds oddly specific, is that based on a real person?
Yeah I got to the end and realised that I never went party slave or boiled frog, so which route did I go? The route of self righteous failure.
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I'm at least partially influenced by my legal background. You know how when a witness is sworn in they are giving an oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
If a witness is asked a question and intentionally omits relevant information, especially if they are pressed on the point, that does in fact constitute perjury. The whole point of witness testimony is to elicit all the truthful information about a situation, and omitting relevant information that one believes to be true is lying under oath. As can be embellishing the facts.
So when I hear mainstream media talking heads using artful or evasive phrasing when describing an event, it immediately turns on my "cross examination" sense.
But hey, newspaper stories and TV reports aren't under oath so perhaps the comparison is strained.
Sounds like you're noticing the fallacious nature of much reporting, where explicit or implied conclusions simply don't logically follow from stated premises and the actual informational content of the report is diluted to the point its useless. The noise drowns out the signal. Which may be less about deceit and more about catering to an audience.
Which brings up:
Simplest explanation is that they understand that their paycheck depends on them espousing a particular viewpoint to the audience that supports them and they adjust accordingly.
I read a comment a long time ago during the Obama years that elucidated this for me. Basically, imagine you're Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity and you KNOW your job hinges on telling your audience that Obama is the antichrist.
And one day the report comes out that Obama rescued a drowning puppy and gave it CPR to revive it. There's photos, videos, and gushing eyewitness testimony. It is all very heroic.
Does this mean you have to change your message that night? No. You just sigh, go on the air, and figure some way to spin it to say this just PROVES Obama is Satanic. You have to, it's what you do.
Switch out whichever media personalities and politicians you want, that applies across the board.
And the same thing applies. Somewhat less obviously, with reporters. Across the board.
They have a job, not principles. And that job depends on maintaining an audience.
But aren't there a bunch of mechanisms in court for masking out information that colors the opinions of the jurors without being in fact pertinent to the precise questions asked? Ie. witnesses are supposed to answer completely, but they're specifically not supposed to give information that would suggest inferences that they don't have direct knowledge of? It seems to me that inasmuch as the media lies, it is in good part with additional information that would be struck in court - too much truth, rather than not enough.
(Sadly, there is no Media Judge to strike paragraphs for hearsay.)
Yes, and there's no opposing attorney to object to irrelevant testimony or to cross-examine and impeach the witness by catching them in a contradiction or revealing a "hidden" motive to lie.
It's all very frustrating for someone who is used to being able to directly attack seeming false or evasive answers on the spot, with a witness who cannot escape the questioning or shout you down.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Most people aren't going to be as competent and trained in argumentation to spot these evasions but a big problem our society has is that even our "elites" can't spot them when the evasions are done as long as they're being done for reasons the NYT would support.
Implicitly their epistemology is "believe the implication of the NYT - don't look for the missing factual content or added non-factual content".
Very few people can reason out an epistemology on their own - most need to be educated in it. At the very least almost everyone needs to read about it and to do that one would have to find the right reading material. This means there's a lot of power in getting to set the ground rules of evaluating claims and installing a faulty epistemology - look at wikipedia and how it launders progressive claims through the "reliable sources" rule. The wikipedia rules are rules for deciding what should get printed on the site which implicitly makes them rules about discerning truth.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
Strong agree.
Yeah, it seems like the goal is to get the average person, or at least the average voter, to completely outsource their beliefs about the world beyond their immediate surroundings to """trusted""" third parties... whilst also ensuring that those third parties are never accountable for getting any given report wrong, or ignoring a relevant story, or even outright spinning or modifying the facts on occasion.
This is perhaps where the comparison to religious faith becomes most apt. Rather than perceiving/divining the 'truth' themselves, the people are expected to accept the church's edicts and bring any queries one has to the priests who can sort things right out and possibly punish nonbelievers.
At which point, the only factual disputes that may be permitted are interdenominational ones.
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I’m skeptical of his methodology because the usual pattern for the media lying is to do so on air, rather than in print articles. The articles on the infowars website are just a biased news source; most of the infamous and or ridiculous lies were uttered on his radio program. And, say, Rittenhouse or the Covington Catholic kids had lies told about them… mostly on air or in op Ed’s, not on the front pages of the NYT.
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Richard Nixon also very rarely lied as president. And according to all available evidence, my former neighbor's ex-fiancee who was cheered on by her "friends" to get drunker than usual and swallow a stripper's cock at her bachelorette party (guiltily admitting it a few days later) very rarely lied in her relationship. 5-10 HIPAA violations in a 10 or 20 year medical career is a rare pattern of lying. (And to jump categories, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold only very rarely shot people.)
Of course I actually read the article and realize that the above is not the point of it at all, but I just thought it'd be worth pointing out that it often does not practically exonerate a liar at all for them to have lied (explicitly or otherwise as the article highlights) only "very rarely".
NYT only doesn't lie so that when they do it has the maximum chance of being believed when they do - a problem which is not unique to NYT but is shared by everyone who explicitly or implicitly has a utilitarian ethical framework.
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This is false and a cheap trick for gaining attentional emphasis.
Of course it is a truism to understand that medias often use omissions and quantifier alteration.
It might be more frequent than straight lies however the media do lies often about basic facts and as such it is not rare let alone very rare.
A common straight lie for example is to claim that there is no scientific evidence about something or to claim there is a single and consensual scientific voice about something.
Those straights lies (just one example among many) are very frequent and potent.
There's also the tactic by media supporters of having different standards for literal truth.
"We didn't literally mean there's absoluitely no scientific evidence for it. We meant that there's no good scientific evidence that has been published in Nature."
Of course, this is a one way ratchet. If the media said X, but means Y, and X is false, we're supposed to ignore the literal falsity of X. But if Y is false, we're supposed to do the opposite and ignore the falsity, taking X literally instead.
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It's lying through omission or embellishment. Like failing to disclose the race of a murder suspect, or taking quotes out of context. A favorite technique is to interview a lot of people and then cherry-pick the most salacious quote as part of the title as somehow being representative of everyone interviewed .
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