Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

The real problem isn't the existence of misinformation (whatever that means): it's that powerful people want to have their cake and eat it too.

They want the masses to unhesitatingly believe whatever propaganda they're fed (Politician Y says X and therefore X is true, Independent Fact Checkers Say Y is true so no further investigation is needed), but not trust whatever naughty conspiracy theories they read. That doesn't work. If you're tuned to believe whatever you read is true, you can't just suddenly shut off that impulse.

You could solve misinformation tomorrow if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something like the following: "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain."

We all know that nobody with any bit of power is ever going to say anything like that.

I'd add another sentence to that:

"Understand that even with the best intentions you'll likely still get it wrong."

Objective truth is incredibly unwieldly. It's almost impossible to get right - just considering imperfections in communication alone.

Ever play the game of telephone? One person tells a fact to someone, who tells that fact to another person. Go 3 hops and you're almost certainly going to end with a different fact than you started with.

Each step of knowledge transfer incurs loss - and this applies to all forms of communication.

Information is entropic? Once lost it’s probably hard to restructure it to the original version.

Nice framing. I agree with that interpretation.

I'd argue communication is always an approximation to an ideal, anyways. The original version is going to be incomplete. How adequately can English (or your language of choice) represent a complex event or concept?

> "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain."

Everyone already knows this in a vague sense, and in fact that's a large part of the problem. If they weren't aware of this they'd at least be more likely to consider both sides, instead they can just say the statement they don't like is the inaccurate one while blindly accepting the statement they agree with is not.

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