I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this. In the abstract, I think it's of course a good thing to entertain a broad spectrum of viewpoints. But I feel like a lot of people haven't updated their...
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this. In the abstract, I think it's of course a good thing to entertain a broad spectrum of viewpoints. But I feel like a lot of people haven't updated their priors about our political and media ecosystems in a long time, and treating self-described conservative news sources as worth reading to keep you out of your bubble gives undue legitimacy to the organizations most responsible for undermining our society, with their mixture of hate-mongering, corporate astroturf, and deranged conspiracy theories. You can have a very healthy and diverse news diet without including garbage like Fox and OAN.
There's also that false neutrality problem. The neonazi should not get equal treatment as his opposition. The psuedoscience to the science. Perhaps we would not be in such dire straights if valid...
There's also that false neutrality problem.
The neonazi should not get equal treatment as his opposition. The psuedoscience to the science.
Perhaps we would not be in such dire straights if valid observations were not dismissed as being biased, and that facts couldn't be easily countered with lies in the name of 'hearing from both sides.'
Even the most reputable US media has been shown to have heavy bias towards US interests. I will read Russian news periodically as a compare/contrast. Because their propaganda sheds light on our own and makes ours easier to spot. Perhaps that's why it is so villified when they engage in it but ours is barely a footnote when discovered.
The quote Really bugged me. Sure it sounds good, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Some people are pro segregation. Apparently I don't understand the issue unless I can make a passionate...
The quote
“Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides, you don’t understand the issue.”
Really bugged me. Sure it sounds good, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Some people are pro segregation. Apparently I don't understand the issue unless I can make a passionate argument in favor of segregation. Or how about people who say slavery or the Holocaust weren't so bad. Because there are many people with those beliefs. Or just pick any atrocity from history.
And that's without even talking about the dedicated right wing misinformation machine.
Listening to other people's view points is good if they're operating in good faith. But after bad actors (for example Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro) have shown time and time again that they're not, you shouldn't listen to them. And you probably shouldn't put much stock in people who do.
"Passionate" is probably the wrong word, but honestly you probably don't fully understand the issue if you can't articulate a pro-segregation argument that would, at first glance, seem reasonable...
Apparently I don't understand the issue unless I can make a passionate argument in favor of segregation.
"Passionate" is probably the wrong word, but honestly you probably don't fully understand the issue if you can't articulate a pro-segregation argument that would, at first glance, seem reasonable to an otherwise decent human being.
Now arguably you don't need to truly understand the issue in an overall sense when it comes to knowing how you ought to live your life and what is good or bad. But it would definitely get in your way when it comes to being able to engage in good faith discussion about the topic, persuading fence-sitters or neutral people, or trying to politically organize around it. In those cases it actually is useful to understand what the bad faith actors are saying and why in order to understand what underlying itch they're scratching that makes people buy into it.
The tactics you need to use to stem the flow of misinformation are different than the ones you need to use to reconvert folks for bad beliefs I've done a fair amount of scicomms work and one of...
The tactics you need to use to stem the flow of misinformation are different than the ones you need to use to reconvert folks for bad beliefs
I've done a fair amount of scicomms work and one of the lessons I've taken away is that giving bad arguments a platform and trying to debate them just helps them spread.
If you give a climate change denier a platform to debate you, it just makes people think "a lot of smart sounding people appear to disagree on this, I guess it's still up for debate" because they don't have the background to parse fact from fiction and debate is mostly about performance over substance.
Of course when applied to politics it's important to distinguish which ideas are okay to disagree on and which ones aren't. For instance, if someone wants to discuss the pros and cons of different tax policies, that's fine and there are different and valid schools of thought about how to organize society, even if people passionately disagree. But if people are saying shit like "actually trump won the election and is the secret president who will return to power and rid the country of the democratic pedophile deep state" or "black people are inherently inferior", (both of which are real things people believe) do not publicly debate them. Do not give them air to spread their bullshit, it's dangerous.
The prone to misinformation crowd aren't really engaging at the level at which people who want to "fully understand the issue" are engaging with these things though. That's a subpopulation that...
The prone to misinformation crowd aren't really engaging at the level at which people who want to "fully understand the issue" are engaging with these things though. That's a subpopulation that cares primarily about winning arguments, which is way overrepresented among internet commenters and people who engage with print media and buy subscriptions, but is actually pretty teeny in terms of raw numbers overall. Most of the targets of disinformation are actually very unlikely to seek out information that contradicts their priors. They tend to be driven by lazily reinforced underlying biases, a discomfort with ambiguity that leads them to make prejudicial snap-judgements, and an overdeveloped sense for pattern matching.
In fact, I'd say this is a completely different group of people we're dealing with but they all inhabit the same ecosystem. The conservative media outlets (your Fox News and Newsmax networks) are the large mammals, like elk or bison or elephants, that roam around posting shit everywhere. This nourishes the organisms at the second trophic level, like your Ben Shapiro epic debate bros, who collect and reprocess that shit like dung beetles. That nourishes the third trophic level of dime-a-dozen retweeters and content 'creators' who scatter it around to where it's most needed. Then you've got the bottom tier of plants and bacteria that thrive on the shit. The misinformation types you're talking about are the third levels and you don't want to be engaging with them since their whole game is to scatter the processed shit around.
But the first and second levels do need to be actively taken down and debunked because they're already big enough to have platforms regardless of whether you want to elevate it or not. Having a healthy ecosystem means actively keeping their population in check, the way reintroducing wolves to eat the elk ended up improving the ecology wherever they went. Otherwise the elk run rampant and devour everything in sight until there is nothing left but them, their poop, and the stuff that lives off their poop.
I'm not sure if I would agree with your metaphor, but I might need to think about it more. I would argue that larger organizations like Fox aren't really generating most of what we see, they're...
I'm not sure if I would agree with your metaphor, but I might need to think about it more.
I would argue that larger organizations like Fox aren't really generating most of what we see, they're just amplifying it. A lot of it comes from way more fringe outlets or forums which Fox and other organizations repackage and make more palatable for larger audiences. Sort of like the citogenesis comic from xkcd, but with Fox standing in for Wikipedia. Which is to say it's more like a feedback loop than a top-down hierarchy.
The thing about bad actors and debate me bros is that by giving the a platform, you're giving them access to your audience and your reputation. That's what they're really after.
But I do agree that most people (not just targets of misinformation) don't actively seek out contradictory information. And the filter bubbles that tech companies have created don't help.
And your point about people being uncomfortable with uncertainty is dead on and, in my opinion, a huge part of the problem, especially when it comes to scicomms. Most of the scientists I know tend not to speak in absolutes, even if they've spent literal years studying a topic. There's so much that's unknown about the world and most things that we treat as facts are really just approximations with varying degrees of certainty. It's understandable when you're looking at the world through a scientific mindset and care about truth. But it does terribly in debates against people who either aren't knowledgeable about a subject or just don't care about the truth, but are able to speak confidently.
Oh I wouldn't actually go looking for them. But they have a habit of butting in, like, everywhere. And their arguments tend to find their way into tons of places. The BS needs to get smacked down...
The thing about bad actors and debate me bros is that by giving the a platform, you're giving them access to your audience and your reputation. That's what they're really after.
Oh I wouldn't actually go looking for them. But they have a habit of butting in, like, everywhere. And their arguments tend to find their way into tons of places. The BS needs to get smacked down somewhere to keep it from continuing to spread. I generally don't engage with the people making the points and don't even really mention them. I largely focus on the specific facts/misconceptions that form the foundation of the bad worldview. But to do that, you need to kind of have a sense for what's underneath the stupid thing they're saying that's driving it.
Most of the scientists I know tend not to speak in absolutes, even if they've spent literal years studying a topic. There's so much that's unknown about the world and most things that we treat as facts are really just approximations with varying degrees of certainty.
Oh God! I just flashback cringed at all the "lab leak theory" stuff I've had people try to lecture me about recently.
Oh yeah, definitely. But really shredding a bigotted viewpoint is pretty difficult and risks giving it air. And it's important that you not treat it as legitimate and up for debate. You need to...
The BS needs to get smacked down somewhere to keep it from continuing to spread.
Oh yeah, definitely. But really shredding a bigotted viewpoint is pretty difficult and risks giving it air. And it's important that you not treat it as legitimate and up for debate. You need to absolutely destroy them and their argument and you need to do it succinctly. Lots of assholes use the trapping of "polite" intellectual disagreement to push crypto-fascist bullshit and many folks aren't well versed in how to read the subtext.
If someone is denying the civil war was about slavery don't write a 10 paragraph point by point takedown or whatever. Just be like "Hey dumbass, they said it was about slavery" and link to the various declarations of succession. Maybe with a quote. And don't let them distract you when they inevitably move the goal posts or try to motte and bailey or whatever.
But this is a bridge burning technique that focuses on folks you don't care about for the sake of not letting their shit spread. Don't use this technique on someone you actually like and want to bring back to reality, because it will most likely make that much harder. And don't do it against actual reasonable disagreements, because then you're the asshole. Most people don't deserve to become twitter's main character, even if they say something offensive.
It also comes with certain risks. If you make someone angry, they might take out their frustration on marginalized folks. I'm not sure of a way around that problem.
And yeah... the fucking lab leak "theory". Jesus christ, that makes me want to smack my head into a wall.
Yes, that's the one. And from what I can tell that seems like a pretty solid article, but I'm admitted not an epidemiologist and some of the science went over my head. And note that this is my own...
Yes, that's the one. And from what I can tell that seems like a pretty solid article, but I'm admitted not an epidemiologist and some of the science went over my head. And note that this is my own personal recollection and interpretation (as with everything in this discussion) so I might have some details wrong.
The thing about the lab leak discussion wasn't that a bunch of scientists we're saying it was impossible. It's that there was a transparently partisan push to claim that was what happened so that Trump and his supporters could have someone to blame.
In the article they quote several scientists saying shit like "There's no credible evidence" or "There's no reason to believe it came from a lab". Which is just scientist speak for saying: there are multiple possible explanations, but there is no reason to assume this over other possibilities. Or more succinctly "we don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". As a whole the scientific community was undecided and most of the folks with the expertise to investigate were busy trying to contain the spread and figure out a vaccine. The doctors and epidemiologists I'm friends with have been working their asses off trying to save lives at great personal sacrifice. They had bigger fish to fry.
Rewind to early on in the pandemic when fringe right wing folks started talking about the lab over in Wuhan. They were like "a lab in the same place that the disease came from? IT MUST BE THE ORIGIN. THAT'S JUST LOGIC".
Meanwhile, the right wing media ecosystem was still in full on denial of the existence of the pandemic in the first place. Claiming the whole thing was a liberal conspiracy to discredit Trump.
And Trump was doing fuck all to contain the spread. When he wasn't actively making things worse. (This was before we knew that he knew how bad it was.)
This goes on for a while and eventually you see both behaviors coming from the same people. Folks who would say "The pandemic is a hoax" would turn around and say "The China Virus* is killing patriotic Americans. We need to hold China accountable" and five minutes later they would be back to saying it was fake and overstated. Something something freedom something something.
*Or several other even more racist terms which I won't repeat here
And you started to see folks not really distinguishing an accidental leak from the idea that the Chinese government did it on purpose. Either way blame China, amiright?
So this all mixed into one incredibly inconsistent pile of competing ideas where the central theme was that Trump was a blameless victim and whoever else was responsible for the tragedy, be it China or the libs or just a random accident or whatever else.
And at the same time those same people were claiming masks were dangerous and refusing to quarantine. Just being absolutely selfish for no reason.
So it was pretty clear that the folks pushing the lab leak theory weren't doing so out of intellectual honesty and cutiosity. They were doing it so that they had someone to blame.
If your next door neighbor is shooting off bottle rockets** and one lands in your yard and you know about it. If you sit back and tell your family it's under control while your drunk friend starts pouring gasoline on the fire, you don't get to then turn around and blame your neighbor for burning your house down
**This metaphor assumes reckless behavior on the part of the neighbor, which isn't a given. I'm just trying to build the metaphor on the fly.
And I get that some individuals on the right held intellectually consistent views and behaved responsibly. I don't blame those folks or mean to call them out.
Also, there have been many folks that have been unable to quarantine and I don't blame then either.
tl;dr:
We still don't know about the origin of the virus, but known liars and opportunists don't get credit even if they're accidentally right. Stopped clocks and all.
Edit:
Looking back that was way longer than I intended for it to be
Edit 2:
Oh and hate crimes against Asian Americans went way up as a direct result
Why must someone do this? One can simply wish to know enough to understand the right stance to have an issue. One does not need to proselytize to others about what the right stance is. I think...
when it comes to being able to engage in good faith discussion about the topic, persuading fence-sitters or neutral people, or trying to politically organize around it
Why must someone do this? One can simply wish to know enough to understand the right stance to have an issue. One does not need to proselytize to others about what the right stance is.
I think it's perfectly fine to have a wide variety of information as @PapaNachos has suggested, where it is curated to only sources which are not designed to misinform, have disdain for science, are disrespectful to certain humans, or otherwise are not worthy of consumption.
Someone, somewhere is going to need to do the deeper work of understanding what actual theoretical underpinnings and moral frameworks form the foundation of that "right stance." And when people...
Someone, somewhere is going to need to do the deeper work of understanding what actual theoretical underpinnings and moral frameworks form the foundation of that "right stance." And when people who don't know better go seeking out information about these things those people are going to need to be around to explain it to them. Otherwise you just have in-groups of people preaching to the choir.
You can't have an entire system that exists solely on received wisdom, that's not going to be very resilient. Realistically you can probably only get most people to having true beliefs, but it takes too much work to get them to justified true beliefs. You just have to count on enough people in the information ecosystem to have done the hard work of justification and dismissal of unjustified beliefs.
Obviously, but you were suggesting that I need to understand the arguments that an extremist has in enough detail that I need to learn from the source and I think that's an extreme statement. It's...
Obviously, but you were suggesting that I need to understand the arguments that an extremist has in enough detail that I need to learn from the source and I think that's an extreme statement. It's plenty enough to recognize when websites and organizations are able to offer unbiased information. I don't need a fundamental and deep understanding of why certain bigots think killing certain populations is acceptable, I merely need to understand that killing is not okay. The same can apply to vaccine deniers and an understanding of the science behind vaccines to know my position is a good one. This can be applied to many aspects of life and being able to coherently argue why a conservative thinks gay marriage is not okay is entirely unimportant to understanding how to morally choose the correct one.
As you mentioned
You just have to count on enough people in the information ecosystem to have done the hard work of justification and dismissal of unjustified beliefs.
This work can be done by others and so long as you have the skills to understand how to tell if they have done the work, you don't need to actually do any of the work yourself. And understanding how to tell if someone else did work requires much less insight and research than doing the work.
It's not though. If you don't actually understand the underlying logic behind their perspective you can't actually tell if your moral beliefs are justified. You're basically taking it on hearsay...
This can be applied to many aspects of life and being able to coherently argue why a conservative thinks gay marriage is not okay is entirely unimportant to understanding how to morally choose the correct one.
It's not though. If you don't actually understand the underlying logic behind their perspective you can't actually tell if your moral beliefs are justified. You're basically taking it on hearsay that it's true because your community you associate with has asserted that it's true. You might say "killing is not okay" but I guarantee that you think it is okay under a host of circumstances. Few but the most extreme Jain ascetics are hardliners on that.
This work can be done by others and so long as you have the skills to understand how to tell if they have done the work, you don't need to actually do any of the work yourself.
If you want to engage in discussions on the topic or teach anyone things related to the topic you actually do need to have done the work yourself. Otherwise precocious arguers are going to talk you into corners and you won't have any argument but force.
I agree, but you can keep that in mind without supporting the twisted informational ecosystems keeping them enthralled by far right politics. I think most people (especially outside Twitter and...
I agree, but you can keep that in mind without supporting the twisted informational ecosystems keeping them enthralled by far right politics. I think most people (especially outside Twitter and other vapid social media) understand that a third of the country are basically normal people that have been intentionally politically radicalized by right wing propaganda outlets, and didn't need to consume that propaganda themselves to figure it out.
The article doesn't suggest this at all as far as I can tell. Am I missing something? Edit to add: The article is about news sources that try to e.g. "give the best of both sides" or "stand...
treating self-described conservative news sources as worth reading to keep you out of your bubble
You can have a very healthy and diverse news diet without including garbage like Fox and OAN.
The article doesn't suggest this at all as far as I can tell. Am I missing something?
I've seen people on Tildes express that they use comments to decide whether or not to read an article, so I hope those people don't skip past this article thinking it's about reading hate-mongering, corporate astroturfing, or conspiracy-laden news sources to combat echo chambers and filter bubbles, like your comment might suggest. It's not.
I went to a couple of the linked sites and on ground news saw articles that were almost exclusively sourced by those far right outlets, about how Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine all...
I went to a couple of the linked sites and on ground news saw articles that were almost exclusively sourced by those far right outlets, about how Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine all along. The fact that you use an aggregator rather than viewing them directly doesn't make them not a part of your information ecosystem.
That depends on the aggregator, doesn't it? Dismissing all the news sources the article linked just because one of them included one far-right article seems a bit knee-jerk to me. I can understand...
That depends on the aggregator, doesn't it? Dismissing all the news sources the article linked just because one of them included one far-right article seems a bit knee-jerk to me.
I can understand not wanting to sift through them to find out which, if any, are worth paying attention to. But personally, I am happy to do that legwork when I have the time, I almost didn't read the article because of your comment, and I'm glad I did read it in spite of that because I wouldn't be aware of the linked news sources otherwise.
All I'm saying is that I hope people don't skip over an article they might have otherwise read because of the negative reaction to it.
The thing is, going too far in the other direction has its issues too. If your aggregator is only pulling inoffensive and fairly mainstream articles from far right news sources, that's going to...
The thing is, going too far in the other direction has its issues too. If your aggregator is only pulling inoffensive and fairly mainstream articles from far right news sources, that's going to make people think that that's representative of the content there, that the ideas embodied by those sources and the people they've radicalized are more reasonable than they are, and make them more resistant to seeing them as they actually are. At the end of the day I just can't see any healthy way to integrate right wing news into your feed, not in this media environment.
And to anyone who hasn't, by all means read the article. Disagreeing with it doesn't mean don't read it, and that's not at all what I was intending, it was good food for thought.
Honestly part of the problem with polarization has been that it's literally impossible to find decent, good faith arguments for certain conservative positions. I often find I can make better...
Honestly part of the problem with polarization has been that it's literally impossible to find decent, good faith arguments for certain conservative positions. I often find I can make better arguments for a lot of conservative positions that I don't even agree with than they can. This is because they're so soaked in their echo chambers that their model of how the world works bears only the most tenuous relationship to objective reality. It's like they're calculating orbital dynamics from a ptolemaic model of the solar system. Even if they happen to be right about something it's based on absolutely batshit premises.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this. In the abstract, I think it's of course a good thing to entertain a broad spectrum of viewpoints. But I feel like a lot of people haven't updated their priors about our political and media ecosystems in a long time, and treating self-described conservative news sources as worth reading to keep you out of your bubble gives undue legitimacy to the organizations most responsible for undermining our society, with their mixture of hate-mongering, corporate astroturf, and deranged conspiracy theories. You can have a very healthy and diverse news diet without including garbage like Fox and OAN.
There's also that false neutrality problem.
The neonazi should not get equal treatment as his opposition. The psuedoscience to the science.
Perhaps we would not be in such dire straights if valid observations were not dismissed as being biased, and that facts couldn't be easily countered with lies in the name of 'hearing from both sides.'
Even the most reputable US media has been shown to have heavy bias towards US interests. I will read Russian news periodically as a compare/contrast. Because their propaganda sheds light on our own and makes ours easier to spot. Perhaps that's why it is so villified when they engage in it but ours is barely a footnote when discovered.
The quote
Really bugged me. Sure it sounds good, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Some people are pro segregation. Apparently I don't understand the issue unless I can make a passionate argument in favor of segregation. Or how about people who say slavery or the Holocaust weren't so bad. Because there are many people with those beliefs. Or just pick any atrocity from history.
And that's without even talking about the dedicated right wing misinformation machine.
Listening to other people's view points is good if they're operating in good faith. But after bad actors (for example Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro) have shown time and time again that they're not, you shouldn't listen to them. And you probably shouldn't put much stock in people who do.
"Passionate" is probably the wrong word, but honestly you probably don't fully understand the issue if you can't articulate a pro-segregation argument that would, at first glance, seem reasonable to an otherwise decent human being.
Now arguably you don't need to truly understand the issue in an overall sense when it comes to knowing how you ought to live your life and what is good or bad. But it would definitely get in your way when it comes to being able to engage in good faith discussion about the topic, persuading fence-sitters or neutral people, or trying to politically organize around it. In those cases it actually is useful to understand what the bad faith actors are saying and why in order to understand what underlying itch they're scratching that makes people buy into it.
The tactics you need to use to stem the flow of misinformation are different than the ones you need to use to reconvert folks for bad beliefs
I've done a fair amount of scicomms work and one of the lessons I've taken away is that giving bad arguments a platform and trying to debate them just helps them spread.
If you give a climate change denier a platform to debate you, it just makes people think "a lot of smart sounding people appear to disagree on this, I guess it's still up for debate" because they don't have the background to parse fact from fiction and debate is mostly about performance over substance.
Of course when applied to politics it's important to distinguish which ideas are okay to disagree on and which ones aren't. For instance, if someone wants to discuss the pros and cons of different tax policies, that's fine and there are different and valid schools of thought about how to organize society, even if people passionately disagree. But if people are saying shit like "actually trump won the election and is the secret president who will return to power and rid the country of the democratic pedophile deep state" or "black people are inherently inferior", (both of which are real things people believe) do not publicly debate them. Do not give them air to spread their bullshit, it's dangerous.
The prone to misinformation crowd aren't really engaging at the level at which people who want to "fully understand the issue" are engaging with these things though. That's a subpopulation that cares primarily about winning arguments, which is way overrepresented among internet commenters and people who engage with print media and buy subscriptions, but is actually pretty teeny in terms of raw numbers overall. Most of the targets of disinformation are actually very unlikely to seek out information that contradicts their priors. They tend to be driven by lazily reinforced underlying biases, a discomfort with ambiguity that leads them to make prejudicial snap-judgements, and an overdeveloped sense for pattern matching.
In fact, I'd say this is a completely different group of people we're dealing with but they all inhabit the same ecosystem. The conservative media outlets (your Fox News and Newsmax networks) are the large mammals, like elk or bison or elephants, that roam around posting shit everywhere. This nourishes the organisms at the second trophic level, like your Ben Shapiro epic debate bros, who collect and reprocess that shit like dung beetles. That nourishes the third trophic level of dime-a-dozen retweeters and content 'creators' who scatter it around to where it's most needed. Then you've got the bottom tier of plants and bacteria that thrive on the shit. The misinformation types you're talking about are the third levels and you don't want to be engaging with them since their whole game is to scatter the processed shit around.
But the first and second levels do need to be actively taken down and debunked because they're already big enough to have platforms regardless of whether you want to elevate it or not. Having a healthy ecosystem means actively keeping their population in check, the way reintroducing wolves to eat the elk ended up improving the ecology wherever they went. Otherwise the elk run rampant and devour everything in sight until there is nothing left but them, their poop, and the stuff that lives off their poop.
I'm not sure if I would agree with your metaphor, but I might need to think about it more.
I would argue that larger organizations like Fox aren't really generating most of what we see, they're just amplifying it. A lot of it comes from way more fringe outlets or forums which Fox and other organizations repackage and make more palatable for larger audiences. Sort of like the citogenesis comic from xkcd, but with Fox standing in for Wikipedia. Which is to say it's more like a feedback loop than a top-down hierarchy.
The thing about bad actors and debate me bros is that by giving the a platform, you're giving them access to your audience and your reputation. That's what they're really after.
But I do agree that most people (not just targets of misinformation) don't actively seek out contradictory information. And the filter bubbles that tech companies have created don't help.
And your point about people being uncomfortable with uncertainty is dead on and, in my opinion, a huge part of the problem, especially when it comes to scicomms. Most of the scientists I know tend not to speak in absolutes, even if they've spent literal years studying a topic. There's so much that's unknown about the world and most things that we treat as facts are really just approximations with varying degrees of certainty. It's understandable when you're looking at the world through a scientific mindset and care about truth. But it does terribly in debates against people who either aren't knowledgeable about a subject or just don't care about the truth, but are able to speak confidently.
Oh I wouldn't actually go looking for them. But they have a habit of butting in, like, everywhere. And their arguments tend to find their way into tons of places. The BS needs to get smacked down somewhere to keep it from continuing to spread. I generally don't engage with the people making the points and don't even really mention them. I largely focus on the specific facts/misconceptions that form the foundation of the bad worldview. But to do that, you need to kind of have a sense for what's underneath the stupid thing they're saying that's driving it.
Oh God! I just flashback cringed at all the "lab leak theory" stuff I've had people try to lecture me about recently.
Oh yeah, definitely. But really shredding a bigotted viewpoint is pretty difficult and risks giving it air. And it's important that you not treat it as legitimate and up for debate. You need to absolutely destroy them and their argument and you need to do it succinctly. Lots of assholes use the trapping of "polite" intellectual disagreement to push crypto-fascist bullshit and many folks aren't well versed in how to read the subtext.
If someone is denying the civil war was about slavery don't write a 10 paragraph point by point takedown or whatever. Just be like "Hey dumbass, they said it was about slavery" and link to the various declarations of succession. Maybe with a quote. And don't let them distract you when they inevitably move the goal posts or try to motte and bailey or whatever.
But this is a bridge burning technique that focuses on folks you don't care about for the sake of not letting their shit spread. Don't use this technique on someone you actually like and want to bring back to reality, because it will most likely make that much harder. And don't do it against actual reasonable disagreements, because then you're the asshole. Most people don't deserve to become twitter's main character, even if they say something offensive.
It also comes with certain risks. If you make someone angry, they might take out their frustration on marginalized folks. I'm not sure of a way around that problem.
And yeah... the fucking lab leak "theory". Jesus christ, that makes me want to smack my head into a wall.
Yes, that's the one. And from what I can tell that seems like a pretty solid article, but I'm admitted not an epidemiologist and some of the science went over my head. And note that this is my own personal recollection and interpretation (as with everything in this discussion) so I might have some details wrong.
The thing about the lab leak discussion wasn't that a bunch of scientists we're saying it was impossible. It's that there was a transparently partisan push to claim that was what happened so that Trump and his supporters could have someone to blame.
In the article they quote several scientists saying shit like "There's no credible evidence" or "There's no reason to believe it came from a lab". Which is just scientist speak for saying: there are multiple possible explanations, but there is no reason to assume this over other possibilities. Or more succinctly "we don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". As a whole the scientific community was undecided and most of the folks with the expertise to investigate were busy trying to contain the spread and figure out a vaccine. The doctors and epidemiologists I'm friends with have been working their asses off trying to save lives at great personal sacrifice. They had bigger fish to fry.
Rewind to early on in the pandemic when fringe right wing folks started talking about the lab over in Wuhan. They were like "a lab in the same place that the disease came from? IT MUST BE THE ORIGIN. THAT'S JUST LOGIC".
Meanwhile, the right wing media ecosystem was still in full on denial of the existence of the pandemic in the first place. Claiming the whole thing was a liberal conspiracy to discredit Trump.
And Trump was doing fuck all to contain the spread. When he wasn't actively making things worse. (This was before we knew that he knew how bad it was.)
This goes on for a while and eventually you see both behaviors coming from the same people. Folks who would say "The pandemic is a hoax" would turn around and say "The China Virus* is killing patriotic Americans. We need to hold China accountable" and five minutes later they would be back to saying it was fake and overstated. Something something freedom something something.
*Or several other even more racist terms which I won't repeat here
And you started to see folks not really distinguishing an accidental leak from the idea that the Chinese government did it on purpose. Either way blame China, amiright?
So this all mixed into one incredibly inconsistent pile of competing ideas where the central theme was that Trump was a blameless victim and whoever else was responsible for the tragedy, be it China or the libs or just a random accident or whatever else.
And at the same time those same people were claiming masks were dangerous and refusing to quarantine. Just being absolutely selfish for no reason.
So it was pretty clear that the folks pushing the lab leak theory weren't doing so out of intellectual honesty and cutiosity. They were doing it so that they had someone to blame.
If your next door neighbor is shooting off bottle rockets** and one lands in your yard and you know about it. If you sit back and tell your family it's under control while your drunk friend starts pouring gasoline on the fire, you don't get to then turn around and blame your neighbor for burning your house down
**This metaphor assumes reckless behavior on the part of the neighbor, which isn't a given. I'm just trying to build the metaphor on the fly.
And I get that some individuals on the right held intellectually consistent views and behaved responsibly. I don't blame those folks or mean to call them out.
Also, there have been many folks that have been unable to quarantine and I don't blame then either.
tl;dr:
We still don't know about the origin of the virus, but known liars and opportunists don't get credit even if they're accidentally right. Stopped clocks and all.
Edit:
Looking back that was way longer than I intended for it to be
Edit 2:
Oh and hate crimes against Asian Americans went way up as a direct result
Why must someone do this? One can simply wish to know enough to understand the right stance to have an issue. One does not need to proselytize to others about what the right stance is.
I think it's perfectly fine to have a wide variety of information as @PapaNachos has suggested, where it is curated to only sources which are not designed to misinform, have disdain for science, are disrespectful to certain humans, or otherwise are not worthy of consumption.
Someone, somewhere is going to need to do the deeper work of understanding what actual theoretical underpinnings and moral frameworks form the foundation of that "right stance." And when people who don't know better go seeking out information about these things those people are going to need to be around to explain it to them. Otherwise you just have in-groups of people preaching to the choir.
You can't have an entire system that exists solely on received wisdom, that's not going to be very resilient. Realistically you can probably only get most people to having true beliefs, but it takes too much work to get them to justified true beliefs. You just have to count on enough people in the information ecosystem to have done the hard work of justification and dismissal of unjustified beliefs.
Obviously, but you were suggesting that I need to understand the arguments that an extremist has in enough detail that I need to learn from the source and I think that's an extreme statement. It's plenty enough to recognize when websites and organizations are able to offer unbiased information. I don't need a fundamental and deep understanding of why certain bigots think killing certain populations is acceptable, I merely need to understand that killing is not okay. The same can apply to vaccine deniers and an understanding of the science behind vaccines to know my position is a good one. This can be applied to many aspects of life and being able to coherently argue why a conservative thinks gay marriage is not okay is entirely unimportant to understanding how to morally choose the correct one.
As you mentioned
This work can be done by others and so long as you have the skills to understand how to tell if they have done the work, you don't need to actually do any of the work yourself. And understanding how to tell if someone else did work requires much less insight and research than doing the work.
It's not though. If you don't actually understand the underlying logic behind their perspective you can't actually tell if your moral beliefs are justified. You're basically taking it on hearsay that it's true because your community you associate with has asserted that it's true. You might say "killing is not okay" but I guarantee that you think it is okay under a host of circumstances. Few but the most extreme Jain ascetics are hardliners on that.
If you want to engage in discussions on the topic or teach anyone things related to the topic you actually do need to have done the work yourself. Otherwise precocious arguers are going to talk you into corners and you won't have any argument but force.
I agree, but you can keep that in mind without supporting the twisted informational ecosystems keeping them enthralled by far right politics. I think most people (especially outside Twitter and other vapid social media) understand that a third of the country are basically normal people that have been intentionally politically radicalized by right wing propaganda outlets, and didn't need to consume that propaganda themselves to figure it out.
The article doesn't suggest this at all as far as I can tell. Am I missing something?
Edit to add: The article is about news sources that try to e.g. "give the best of both sides" or "stand against bias and information", to use two examples that were linked in the article.
I've seen people on Tildes express that they use comments to decide whether or not to read an article, so I hope those people don't skip past this article thinking it's about reading hate-mongering, corporate astroturfing, or conspiracy-laden news sources to combat echo chambers and filter bubbles, like your comment might suggest. It's not.
I went to a couple of the linked sites and on ground news saw articles that were almost exclusively sourced by those far right outlets, about how Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine all along. The fact that you use an aggregator rather than viewing them directly doesn't make them not a part of your information ecosystem.
That depends on the aggregator, doesn't it? Dismissing all the news sources the article linked just because one of them included one far-right article seems a bit knee-jerk to me.
I can understand not wanting to sift through them to find out which, if any, are worth paying attention to. But personally, I am happy to do that legwork when I have the time, I almost didn't read the article because of your comment, and I'm glad I did read it in spite of that because I wouldn't be aware of the linked news sources otherwise.
All I'm saying is that I hope people don't skip over an article they might have otherwise read because of the negative reaction to it.
The thing is, going too far in the other direction has its issues too. If your aggregator is only pulling inoffensive and fairly mainstream articles from far right news sources, that's going to make people think that that's representative of the content there, that the ideas embodied by those sources and the people they've radicalized are more reasonable than they are, and make them more resistant to seeing them as they actually are. At the end of the day I just can't see any healthy way to integrate right wing news into your feed, not in this media environment.
And to anyone who hasn't, by all means read the article. Disagreeing with it doesn't mean don't read it, and that's not at all what I was intending, it was good food for thought.
Honestly part of the problem with polarization has been that it's literally impossible to find decent, good faith arguments for certain conservative positions. I often find I can make better arguments for a lot of conservative positions that I don't even agree with than they can. This is because they're so soaked in their echo chambers that their model of how the world works bears only the most tenuous relationship to objective reality. It's like they're calculating orbital dynamics from a ptolemaic model of the solar system. Even if they happen to be right about something it's based on absolutely batshit premises.
Nice Wired article about info silos, listing several news sites and other resources that explicitly try to present opposing views w/o bias.