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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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How is that an argument for trusting mainstream newspapers on a culture war topic

It isn't, it's an argument that we do already trust mainstream newspapers as much as we trust random internet commenters in many areas.

Newspapers can be wrong all they want, it's their dishonesty that's the problem

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'. The reason I think this is you can watch that happen organically in internet communities of both left and right wingers, and the information they produce is less reliable than that of the media. Not that explicit intentional dishonesty doesn't exist, it's just much less common - and it's also not obvious it's more frequent in the mainstream media than random internet people.

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'.

I've seen people make this kind of distinction when talking about honesty in general as well as honesty by journalists specifically, and I don't really see how there is a distinction. Making unintentional mistakes or using poor socially influenced reasoning is how a motivated person acts on their belief of "wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!" Almost nobody likes to think of herself as a Machiavellian amoral manipulator and so most people's brains have mechanisms to protect them from such a belief while still enjoying all the advantages of getting to act like one. Making unintentional mistakes (that inevitably follow a pattern of bias in some direction) or not activating one's skepticism towards and protection from the social dynamics that influence one's reasoning is one such mechanism that allows someone to (honestly convince themselves that they) have the cake and eat it too.

For the layman, one might be able to generously extend them enough charity to acknowledge that they're just not to be expected to understand their own biases and how to properly account for them. I don't think we can extend such charity to self-proclaimed journalists. Such people have an active responsibility to convey the truth that they themselves volunteered to take on, and step one of that must be accounting for unconscious mistakes one will inevitably make in a way that confirms their own biases and flatters themselves and their in-group while denigrating their out group. If they haven't taken steps to proactively counter this bias within themselves, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that they are being dishonest, just in a clever way that allows them to honestly convince themselves that they aren't being dishonest.

From one perspective - it has the same outcome, and you need to treat it the same way, and it's still actively harming other citizens, so you're right.

But my point is that, because people who aren't journalists participate in the same dynamics, it can't be a reason to trust non-journalists more than journalists. Right wing twitter users lie more, not less, than the media! And I think right-wing mottizens are substantially wrong as a result of social media dynamics at comparable rates to the media, when we consider the full range of things the media reports on. There are individual domains where one group is clearly more wrong than another.

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes

I don't believe for a moment that the anti-Musk article that started this thread was an honest mistake, any more than Cade Metz' article attacking Scott was.

I think it's somewhere between an honest mistake, negligence, an incentive system to say things that make enemies look bad without caring about truth, and various complicated social failures enabling all of that.

The issue is that if you replaced the NYT with anti-woke people of similar competence and intelligence, it'd get worse in this respect, not better. So it's a mistake to despise the NYT but not despise the 'racist garbageman' on twitter, they're both doing the same thing, and giving the latter power won't actually improve anything by default.

The issue is that if you replaced the NYT with anti-woke people of similar competence and intelligence, it'd get worse in this respect, not better.

I can maybe understand saying it won't get better, by some "power corrupts" argument, but the claim it will get worse requires a significant a amount of evidence.

It isn't, it's an argument that we do already trust mainstream newspapers as much as we trust random internet commenters in many areas.

Or, in fact, a little bit less, as cjet was pointing out.

I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics,

The difference between these two is illustrated by this meme. Even if newspapers' dishonesty is not a result of Machiavellian power games but social dynamics, the fact is they know the negative social dynamics are there, and are doing absolutely nothing to stop them, and are in fact looking for ways to promote them even more.

rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'.

Given the popularity of "don't give ammo to the rightoids" argument on progressive forums, I'm pretty sure that this is also happening quite often. We would of course need access to journalist's private communications to prove it either way, but that just means your denial of it happening is completely irrelevant.

The issue is that you attempt to address the newspapers' dishonesty by trusting the internet people more, but the internet people aren't actually less misleading than the newspapers because

Given the popularity of "don't give ammo to the rightoids" argument on progressive forums, I'm pretty sure that this is also happening quite often

When someone says that, what they're thinking is "this isn't representative of a broader trend but posting it appears to, which feeds prejudice and bias". That kind of thing can be true! You'd accuse left-wingers of doing that themselves whenever they report on a school shooting or a hate crime, accurately. They are not explicitly, intentionally lying.

Also, themotte is smarter than most left-wing sources because we're smart. I don't think we're smarter than center-left rationalists, though, so it can seem themotte (right-wing) is better than other sources (left-wing) but the betterness is the cause, not the right-wingness.

When someone says that, what they're thinking is "this isn't representative of a broader trend but posting it appears to, which feeds prejudice and bias". That kind of thing can be true! You'd accuse left-wingers of doing that themselves whenever they report on a school shooting or a hate crime, accurately.

Actually, no I wouldn't. My approach is the old-internet "battle arena of ideas" or "the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct it". It's good that progressives post about school shootings, because events like that should be discussed. If they want to extrapolate these events into a trend not representative of reality, it's all the better for me, because I can slap them down in le epic internet argument. What's bad is the refusal to post or discuss cases that cannot be used to score political points (or worse, that the other side can use). This is why it's correct to trust internet randos more than mainstream newspapers.

They are not explicitly, intentionally lying.

Again, you might very well be wrong, since there's no way to prove that claim, and reason to believe it to begin with.

But more importantly they are explicitly, and intentionally enforcing the social dynamics that prevent inconvenient facts from being discussed.

Also, themotte is smarter than most left-wing sources because we're smart. I don't think we're smarter than center-left rationalists, though, so it can seem themotte (right-wing) is better than other sources (left-wing) but the betterness is the cause, not the right-wingness.

Since what we're discussing here is whether or not we should trust mainstream newspapers more than internet randos, this only proves my point.

It's good that progressives post about school shootings, because events like that should be discussed

I mean ... not really? Progressives place an entirely unjustified emphasis on school shootings, and, in an unexamined manner, imagine that they are a threat worth mentioning to the well-being of children in the united states. Statistically ... they just aren't. Progressives should post less about school shootings, as a result. My point was just that when a progressive says 'this black shooting isn't worth reporting on because it's over-representing a rare phenomenon', that's wrong for reasons that aren't obvious to the progressive, the social taboo on racism and the idea that the racism is morally bad are melded with factual claim, in ways that make the output quite distinct from intentional dishonesty. (There's another objection like 'most people are stupid and won't be able to individually conclude that core political issues they hold are invalid because of thought experiments about biased reporting of a coin toss' but I'll ignore that for now.)

Since what we're discussing here is whether or not we should trust mainstream newspapers more than internet randos, this only proves my point.

I'm saying you shouldn't trust internet randos more. And if the randos (or more realistically, people 10 layers down the social media telephone game from them) got political power I'm not sure things would improve. If the media really were just being dishonest and there was a second non-dishonest group of people we could swap in for them ... that'd be one thing, but that's not the situation we're in.

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