How to Mislead with Facts
consilienceproject.org
consilienceproject.org
Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.
I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.
Old type publications are competing with clickbait and a million other attention grabbing things online, and have to go down that route as well. The more outrageous the better. That incentive doesn't create good journalism.
In the meantime the market is correcting with things like substack, thank god people like Matt Taibbi and a few others can actually do quality journalism there. Something like substack I think will eventually win out in the quality journalism market.
But it takes time. A lot of people still believe big name publications like the NYT are where quality information comes from. It takes time for markets to change.
Journalism is reaping the "people are idiots, gotta protect them from themselves" ideology we've been actively sowing since at least the 1990s.
Journalists also do as they are told with the resources and time they are granted by capital.
It just turns out that once print newspapers died out it wasnt very profitable to engage in deep, thoughtful or investigative journalism so journalists rarely get paid for it - no matter how valuable it would be for the public.
The economics of writing have changed. This was something done to journalists not by them.
A few years back, I had a coworker who was working his way though a journalism major express this attitude explicitly and uncritically as authoritative information passed to him in a class.
It was an eye opening moment for me, and had significant impacts for how I consumed media, and regarded higher education.
> I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.
It's worth noting that journalism in general has had its revenue streams decimated by Craigslist, clickbait, subscriber loss due to competing with free, etc. Except for very few prestige outlets, most media outlets have been forced to shrink their newsrooms, year after year, for a couple decades. Even though the prestige outlets are healthier, they're not so healthy as to be able to pick up all the slack.
It's easy to criticize someone for not doing as thorough a job as you'd like, but it's not very reasonable when that person is the last man standing from a team of ten, and the team's workload has increased in the meantime.
I also believe journalists, like a lot of middle class folks squeezed by changes in the economy, should be paid and funded better, and I try to spend or send some money towards that, even though I'm between jobs.
If that's not something whoever reads this does, $60 bucks is 5 dollars a month, and if you have a job or enough saved, you might invest in investigative reporting.
Here's a list of some non-profits that produce real journalism. Can't vouch for them all, but ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and Reveal are great.
https://mediablog.prnewswire.com/2018/01/17/non-profit-inves...
I would argue that that is not their primary responsibility. That is, in fact, to put food on the table.
Journalists are not well paid and, more importantly, are easily replaceable. "Real journalism" is hard, but makes no money, while pop-journalism is very easy and profitable. So media companies demand and pay for pop-journalism. And that can be done by far too many people.
So blaming them for doing what they need to do to get paid when doing "real journalism" will get them fired is... pointless.
It's hard for me to blame anyone who needs to put food on the table. Journalism isn't a benevolent profession, people need to get paid. Until money gets disconnected from this profession, I don't think it's ever going to be fair to say "why can't these people be ethical?".
Journalists themselves do NO say that "keep the public informed" is their primary responsibility.
The dominant "why are you a journalist?" answer is "to change the world."
If you want to talk meaningfully about how "facts" are used, you need to be able to invoke any notion at all of propositions and implications. It doesn't matter if your implications are mathematical in nature or scientific in nature or just correlation, facts exist in the structure imposed by implication. And facts without an implication structure are useless.
In order to mislead with a "true" fact A, it needs to already be the case that there is a false fact of the form A implies B already sitting in there. The combination of a belief in A implies B (false) with this newly introduced belief A (true) yields a belief in B (false).
The essence of "lying by telling the truth" is then just finding these false implications, and exploiting them.
Fortunately, It's much easier to fact check implications. If A implies B is false, then you just need to come up with an example of A and not B.
Unfortunately changes to belief do not always propagate reliably, and the combinatorial game is against the implication checkers. For any given true fact A there are as many potential false beliefs of the form A implies B as there are propositions B.
Fortunately, most humans make do with as few (quantified) implications as they can. Rules are hard to remember. Getting rid of false implications is much easier when you can replace them with "true" implications.
I suppose I am arguing then that the solution to all of this is education that doesn't teach facts, but rather implications (which are themselves just higher order facts).
Oh alright, but it's not really as interesting as all that. False implications in the logical context are commonly referred to as logical fallacies. Wikipedia has a (non-exhaustive) list of those. One of the more famous false implications is interesting in that it maps between types of implication.
A is correlated with B implies that A implies (causal) B or B implies (causal) A (note that this is false, with a plethora of different types of counter example). This is probably the most commonly exploited false implication by hucksters, and, perhaps more importantly, is a very common source of false beliefs with no malicious intent at all.
It is easy to leverage this false belief into new false beliefs with true facts. If I want to sell coffee for example, I must convince someone of the buying coffee implies (causal) utility fact. All I must convince them of is that coffee is correlated with a thing that implies (causal) utility. Say for instance, that people with heart conditions have those conditions exacerbated negatively by taking coffee or drinking stimulants, and therefore don't. It follows then that drinking coffee is probably correlated with much better heart health. I phrase my findings as "People who drink coffee tend to have much better cardiac calcium scores", and just watch as people draw the incorrect conclusion about the utility of coffee from this fact, plus their fallacy (plus the additional assumption that better cardiac calcium scores probably don't cause coffee consumption).
I should note that It could very well be that coffee does have utility to you. So as a fact it might still be "true". So it turns out that what really ends up mattering, is not the facts, but the chains of implications that lead you to them.
Do you know if there is a way to encode these reasoning chains so as to assess their validity automatically? Like a knowledge graph with propositions linked in some way?
I have been reading about knowledge graphs but haven't seen this kind of application yet, but I think it should exist.
Symbolic logic. Learn: Truth tables -> rules of implication and replacement -> first order predicate logic -> quantifiers -> second order predicate logic.
Chapter 5 or 6 through 8 of Hurley's intro to logic does a great job imo.
For more statistical propositions, such as those that occur in science. Those exist but they're very flawed, and it's a tremendous effort to get anything useful out of them, on account of them dying when we try to look inside. If you haven't caught on, I'm talking about humans. We have yet to replicate such things automatically. You're certainly welcome to try though :).
I think it's even worse:
implies:
- strongly suggest the truth or existence of (something not expressly stated)
- (of a fact or occurrence) suggest (something) as a logical consequence.
Unless your "implies (causal)" is a reference to a domain specific variation of the word (which laymen won't know anyways), your false conclusion is actually incorrect.
After googling, this seems to be the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
>> In casual use, the word "implies" loosely means suggests rather than requires. However, in logic, the technical use of the word "implies" means "is a sufficient condition for".[3] This is the meaning intended by statisticians when they say causation is not certain. Indeed, p implies q has the technical meaning of the material conditional: if p then q symbolized as p → q. That is "if circumstance p is true, then q follows." In this sense, it is always correct to say "Correlation does not imply causation."
> This is probably the most commonly exploited false implication by hucksters, and, perhaps more importantly, is a very common source of false beliefs with no malicious intent at all.
True, but then it's extremely easy to find large quantities of people on the internet who speak as if (I infer this from the surrounding text of their statement) correlation rules out the possibility of causation.
I would love to know the magnitude of confusion/harm the (typically unrealized) ambiguity and other issues of the English language causes in the world, especially considering how causality links so many things together (often in ways beyond our awareness).
Similarly if I told you I lost 5lb in a week on some new diet it might sound impressive but if I didn't tell you I over-eat and over-hydrated the week before it's not nearly as impressive. Nor if my starting weight was 250lb.
If they've got a well thought out framework for systematizing high quality contextualization, i'd love to hear about it, though.
Really it doesn't matter what sites I list, because they are all shit. The very act of calling themselves "fact checkers" should give it away. Just pick any of them and read their "checks" with a critical mind. Anybody can call themselves a "fact checker", it is a fake claim to authority.
Isn't Snopes also a renowned "fact checker"? I think some scandals regarding their founders came to light recently, but I don't remember the details.
Yes, and despite this, snopes is still one of the better ones. Their articles are well sourced and easy to verify. I'm sure they've made some mistakes, and there've been a few cases where I disagreed with their conclusion or approach, but overall they do a good job.
I expect bias in all sources (including myself), but the key thing is to be prepared to be wrong in one's assumptions, as well as being able to update one's understanding of things as new data arrives.
What seems to work is soundbites that resonate with existing bias. And by work, I mean takes root in hearts and minds.
Possibly you've commuted in from a parallel dimension, and that's why you are suspicious of these fact checkers claiming "the sky is blue" and other obvious lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...
Wikipedia does not really have any bearing on it, as it only cites other sources.
Maybe instead of claiming thousands of lies, his enemies should focus on a couple of especially severe lies and scandals and make a good case about it.
However, most of the times when I looked into such stories, they turned out to be bullshit. So what am I supposed to believe? Obviously I can't fact check 30000 claimed lies. If I read Anti-Trump stories, I would expect his enemies to bring up the worst they have. If those turn out to be bullshit, what is left?
How is the Russian collusion accusation coming along, anyway?
I see some shade thrown at Snopes from time to time, but it's usually of the of "But they're LIBERAL!" variety which is not of much value.
The bias is so widespread many people don't see it, like fish not realizing they're wet.
Whole shelves of books get written about the illegal wars media cheerleads; and about the unconscionable and unimaginable atrocities regularly committed by big agriculture and fossil fuel.
Yet we drown in pure distraction; "debating" whatever clown shit Ben Shapiro or Trump or Biden just said, or tilting at such windmills as trying to cancel Joe Rogan for having conversations with people.
"We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system." - Adam Curtis
Have you ever been friends with someone who includes too many details in their story and they lose track of what they were saying? That's what happens when someone tries to be "unbiased". They include too much and it starts to lose purpose. You won't read a book written this way. Perspective and narrative structures are what engage our attention and help us understand the purpose of the story.
If you think pro-war corporate media's constant military cheer-leading is as valid a perspective as independent media, I have nothing polite to say to you.
I have no problem with trying to be balanced or nuanced, but that's very different than feigned "objectivity" that basically just tries to use handwaving and gaslighting to distract you from considering that every perspective comes from a structure of presuppositions.
If you want to call me a "pedant" for making a distinction between implied, but impossible "objectivity" and balance/nuance, I'm fine with that label, because it's still a point worth making.
People would hope to just recognize that they have different preferences about how others should behave, some of those preferences get condensed into laws and some are argued about indefinitely.
So you can easily show high quality contextualisation - it's showing that the case against is less preferable, e.g. arguing against yourself.
For example, Government posters can say "if you go outside, you have an x% change of having coronavirus, an y% chance of passing that on to someone, who then has a z% chance of being seriously disabled or dying, and they have an a% chance of not obtaining that disease via some other mechanism".
You take the opposing viewpoint and try to dismantle it. This is the role of the media, to inform, not to latch onto micro-facts like "lockdown saves lives" and push them because they're easy wins.
Couple of problems with this. People suck at maths. They also such at comparative risk analysis.
Also, you fight pandemics at the country/region level. Like some people will vote for whoever reduces their tax bill regardless of the actual outcome, some people will go out and mix with others in a pandemic if their own personal risk is low (or appears to them to be low).
Then you have the problem of trusting government. For example, here in the UK evidence suggests ministers in the Tory party used mask buying to funnel > £8Billion extra to friends and associates by having them pretend to be PPE suppliers and then sending them money for orders that were either simply not fulfilled or were fulfilled with unusable product (did they send it back, no, because it achieved the goal!). Now, you want us to trust those same people bit to lie on posters that modify human behaviour at a country-level?
Epidemiological responders only hope is to simplify and be cautious, try to prevent the government perverting the message to their own ends too much.
In usual communication, we focus on fact-checking things in the context in which they're most valid, with the presumption that any contextual ambiguity'd be understood/resolved. In such scenarios, it can make sense to fact-check something literally, in the context in which it's claimed, then handle the contextual-migrations appropriately in discussing inter-related points.
But Twitter-like platforms destroy this -- short blurbs in a relatively context-free space make it difficult to be honest even for folks who'd want to be, and seems to be a playground for folks who'd want to lie under pretense of factuality.
The appropriate reaction to claims removed from context would seem to be to deny them. Not to say that the claim is false (at least, not in a context in which it'd be true), but to note that the claim isn't relevant to the current-context (at least, not without a basis for connecting it to the current-context).
---
To note it, a problem with allowing folks to declare claims as being out-of-context (if they're not required to support it) is that it gives everyone a free-pass to weasel out of acknowledging anything that they dislike. So, it's unsuitable for adversarial contexts or otherwise unreliable exchanges.
Which is what I think makes debates, politics, etc. on platforms like Twitter basically garbage: it's too easy to lie if context isn't observed, and it's too easy to dodge stuff if it is.
So while Twitter-like platforms might workable for non-adversarial exchanges (like sharing pictures, announcements, etc.), adversarial exchanges on such platforms would seem structurally predisposed toward undesirable behavior.
People already try to do this on Twitter and it's always rejected (sometimes with hostility.) I think you're underestimating how bad it is on there. Almost everyone one there is engaging in bad faith, many knowingly, and I'm not really sure how much that specifically even has to do with the platform (other than maybe it encourages tribalism.)
At least there is the chance that someone providing context on Twitter/etc. will have that context seen by the recipients of the out-of-context info.
When someone on, say, Fox News, InfoWars, OANN, etc. does this, there is basically zero chance those people will see context provided on MSNBC/CNN/whatever because they just don't watch those channels.
They were comparing against a scenario where we kept producing the food fed to animals, but that humans had to eat it. Which meant no actual land gains, only a modest reduction in co2 emissions, and that people would become unhealthy by eating 4500kcal/day, mostly from corn.
Even worse than the 3.1mn views is that the study in question was covered positively on TV and in newspapers.
Like grazing sites being interchangeable with farmland. So something like https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets which pictures almost everything that isnt a forest as possible agriculture land.
Same with what types of calories are fed to cows especially. As in for humans indigestible byproducts of industrial agriculture. For example, this is the "corn" we speak about in this context. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissilage Used in both cow and pig feed. Here a picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Sonsbeck... Its the shredded plant. The stuff that gets also used in biogas plants.
Calling these lies by omission out is not something that needs stricter "factchecks" that are less focused on facts to protect people from unwanted conclusions.
You have a statement, like "meat agriculture uses more water than plant agriculture." Then you have a fact checker that says "yup, if you look at the amount of water to raise a cow vs to water a grain field with equivalent weight, calories, or whatever other metric you're using, it takes far more water to raise a cow". This truth gets copied around the internet and used to support claims and policies -- "meat uses more water. We have a water shortage in California. Therefore we should ban cows in California because of the water shortage." The logic makes perfect sense, and all the underlying facts are true.
The video then gave the context, which is that cows are often raised on otherwise unproductive grasslands that aren't used for crops anyways, and those that aren't being raised on unproductive land are usually eating corn from places that don't have as much of a water problem (e.g. the Midwest). This doesn't debunk the fact that a calorie of cow uses more water than a calorie of potato, or corn, or soybean -- you can still find those facts on any fact checker on the internet and they're still just as true -- but it does weaken the claim of "we should ban cows in California to help with the water shortage".
In the context of the linked article, this is both "Decontextualizing and recontextualizing" and "Reinterpreting and pre-framing meaning". The claim "meat uses more water than plants" is decontextualized from the world where corn is grown in places without water problems and meat is often raised in situations where water use is minimal, and reinterpreted and reframed in the context of local environmental problems to support a predetermined conclusion. Of course there are probably examples in the video where it makes the same mistake the other way around -- but by watching both that video, the rebuttals, and the discussion, you can come to a better, more complex understanding of the issue, which can't be a bad thing.
And cows eat a lot of imported corn and therefore the the numbers are wrong? Well. At least not completely. The crop using the largest percentage of water in CA is alfaalfa. Feed. Either used locally as feed, or exported as feed.
It is grows all year round and takes the crown of being the crop that uses the most water in CA (out of a percentage of the total).
Our task is to create new processes for determining what counts as a shared, socially meaningful, mutually understood “truth.” Obviously, this requires more than making sure that every fact is checked.
It's recognizing with double quotes "truth" as a different thing than Truth. Hence it's a confession that their task is to "create a new process for determining what counts as 'truth'" and not genuine fidelity to reality. This means that the process they claim to desire will have, by design, the backdoor of the shared illusion effect. In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
No one has access to "Truth" (with a capital T), the best you can do is try to get closer, and it seems quite honest of them to acknowledge that.
> In other words they want to be marketeers of a shared feeling of truth. That's not science, not professional journalism, that's Propaganda. They accuse people of using facts to manipulate the public imaginary and they propose to solve that problem by becoming that people themselves imposing their own manipulation of facts.
> Here is an idea: You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts. Let reality show you Truth regardless of how that makes you feel and restrain yourself from wanting to impose worldviews on anybody. Nature is infinitely wiser than you (and all of us).
The biggest marketeers of "Propaganda" are those that claim they have access to the capital-T truth. If it feels like you have access to capital-T truth, you're almost certainly trapped inside an ideological construct.
That said, ideological constructs aren't necessarily bad things, since society simply could not function without the shared "truth" they allow for.
I have no solution for the culture war.
Still, we know that even while we don't have access to capital T truth, nature has the rules in place to make the Natural Selection of our paradigms to compete until one of these ideological constructs converge to capital T truth forcing the rest to reveal themselves as false truths that appeared to be valid up to a point by certain individuals in certain epoch of history.
This seems like a fairly ambitious claim, is it a formal idea in philosophy or some other field, and does it happens always/usually or only sometimes?
And also: is it Actually True?
Causal mapping [1] websites can aggregate the back and forth of heated discussions, eliminating emotional responses and distilling the core ideas of each opposing position. Such compilation of facts an argument in a readable, neutral format (e.g. see Kialo)[2] could work like the academic debates of old, allowing facts to be analysed in context and the validity of arguments to be tested on their own merits, not on their emotional appeal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causal_mapping_softwar...
It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all.
Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any primary source information indicating Russian interference in the 2016 election was easy to avoid mentioning anywhere.
Who decides when a fact was omitted? Was the fact pertinent (note: there's a lot of wiggle room here)? How much investigation has to be done to uncover whether there was a lie by omission or actual ignorance?
What would the penalty be?
Thinking you can legislate your way out of this is hopeless idealism.
Demonstrating that a fact is omitted with dishonest intent is tricky business. That doesn't mean we can't guess, but the law does not go by guesses.
in any case, i've watched npr and nyt, two of my mostly former news sources, wrench from simply being biased to being outright hysterically partisan and dishonest. covid (over-)coverage being the most blatant, but it's been a long disintegration of truth and trust.
this is just a little part of the overall movement toward captured capital and centralized power, sweeping up news media along the way (note that these are editorial decisions, with editors seeking favor from the powerful). we're in for a rocky ride.
p.s. - a little tremor hit LA while writing this...
If anything changed in the post-Collateral Murder world, its that the Washington's content filtering and propaganda subtly intensified.
This is literally mental gymnastics, why would it clear their conscience if they intended to mislead? It only clears their conscience because they're doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they're not technically lying.
Wesley: I said the accident occurred after the loop. It did.
Picard: What you neglected to mention was that following the loop your team attempted a maneuver that was the direct cause of the crash. You told the truth up to a point. But a lie of omission is still a lie.
[....]
Picard: The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth. It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based. If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened you don't deserve to wear that uniform.
> The role of war correspondents in the Gulf War would prove to be quite different from their role in Vietnam. The Pentagon blamed the media for the loss of the Vietnam war, and prominent military leaders did not believe the United States could sustain a prolonged and heavily televised war. As a result, numerous restrictions were placed on the activities of correspondents covering the war in the Gulf. Journalists allowed to accompany the troops were organized into "pools", where small groups were escorted into combat zones by US troops and allowed to share their findings later. Those who attempted to strike out on their own and operate outside the pool system claim to have found themselves obstructed directly or indirectly by the military, with passport visas revoked and photographs and notes taken by force from journalists while US forces observed.
DoD has been very up front - it's pay to play, as you noted. Stay in the lines, do what we want, keep your eyes on the narrative we're interested in, and opportunities and access with magically open up for you. Step outside the dotted line and whoops, you're in a warzone buddy and you need to leave now, base commander said so, sorry.
Whereas US foreign correspondents were, and as far as I can tell still are, entirely off limits for intelligence agencies to recruit from, work with, or even really interact with. State has put down as US policy that we respect the institution of (US) journalism, so no co-opting them. It's kind of a point of pride. Now, that doesn't mean avoid lying to them, no selling them, or just doing any of the various government tricks to throw a journalist onto a particular path, it just means none of the very obvious "you're going to drink the Kool aid" that DoD does.
Of course this is in abstract, I'm sure there are exceptions and people who broke the rule, but compared to the British intelligence services, who absolutely co-opted any and all foreign correspondent they could get their hands on, both as intelligence sources and to plant stories, or the Soviet/Russian Fed groups, the US has been relatively principled... relatively being the key word
This is easy to prove. What do the intelligence agencies / government do to a person who leaks? Snowden, Assange, Winner, Manning. We know what they do. Why are there so many articles coming from "anonymous national security sources," where there is no attempt to punish the leaker? It's because it's an intentional plant/leak by said agency.
Any time you read an article sourced by "national security anonymous insider," or something to that effect, it's what the government wants you to think. There's a lot of this regarding ramping up military intervention support, among other things.
For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."
Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.
This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.
The Snopes article that made me take notice of this bias was the one letting Clinton off the hook for equating millennials to "basement dwellers" while speaking to wealthy donors during the 2016 election.
Clinton never used the exact sequence of words “basement dwellers”. Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision. The cherry picked position of asserting that "basement dweller" specifically wasn't used... is fundamentally meaningless, and is exactly the same sort of straw-man you were describing above.
She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):
“And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”
There is no way to read that statement without it dripping with condescension. Without full context, what Snopes advanced was patent misrepresentation… and then on top of that to call the “basement dweller” accusation untrue…? Bullshit. It’s “mixed” at best. Any intellectually honest person with full context would recognize her statements for what they were.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clintons-basement-dwellers/
My hope is that we'll all wake up to these tactics and stop letting politicians and media organizations lie and manipulate us for their own gain. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything anymore, regardless of who says it, unless I see a full, in-context video of the event. Even then it can be iffy due to editing that isn't obvious.
I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be, but I wouldn't say that it was "dripping with derision". Even Bernie Sanders said he agreed with her (granted, he was in full anti-trump mode).
https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/10/02/sanders-agrees...
>She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):
Why should it be? That was part of an answer to a separate question.
IMO, this obsession over minutiae in politicians' impromptu speech is why we end up with a bunch of demogogues that don't get anything done. Anyone with thousands of hours of speech recorded is bound to say some questionable things.
That was the point. Nobody was saying she was a moustache-twirling tie-a-person-to-train-tracks villain in this. The problem is she was angling to pick up enough Sanders primary supporters while being a casually derisive, out-of-touch, faux-sympathetic talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth liberal capitalist tool who was sucking up to monied interests. This was at the crux of her weakness as a candidate... and a key reason how we ended up with Trump. Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.
Snopes cherry picked a position to defend, and willfully excluded the context of Clinton's statements to make it seem less bad than it was.
CNN included the entire text, along with a bunch of apologism. Even fucking Newsweek posted the audio of it even if they didn't put the most incendiary bits in text. Snopes though? They crafted the context to explicitly exclude the most salient parts that the targets of her derision found fault with, and solely focused on a specific phrasing so they could "debunk" it.
> Why should it be?
Because the sum of her words, and the context, matter. Because the most popular fact-checking site on the internet shouldn't be cherry picking its framing in order to push a narrative contrary to the spirit of what happened. Because even if you are probably not offended by her treating young progressives as naive, unrealistic basement-dwellers ("subconsciously" or not), I guarantee the young progressives she was talking about were... and they deserve not to be gaslighted.
And... there was a candidate who everyone agrees, even his detractors, that he never would have said something like this behind closed doors.
So that includes Bernie then? I think your disdain for Clinton does not make you a fair judge of the quality of this fact check. Snopes isn't a news website, so they wouldn't cover the entire Q&A session. Also, the question wasn't whether Clinton thinks of Bernie supporters as basement dwellers. It's whether she called them that, which is unequivocally no.
Snopes isn't a news site, they are fact-checking site... which means their politicization should be less, and their need for full fair context should be greater, as compared to the likes of CNN.
You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.
Regardless of where my passion might be on this matter, I'm not wrong that cherry-picked framing and the removal of context gives the reader a significantly less accurate view.
It's not contextual. It was an entirely separate answer to another question on a matter that has nothing to do with whether Hilary called Bernie supporters basement dwellers. At this rate, you might as well include the entire corpus of everything Hilary ever said.
No matter how you put it, this is a cut and dry fact. Again, the question wasn't whether Hilary is condescending. It was whether she used those particular words which she did not.
Mixture: It was not just one phone, but many, and it was one of her aides, not Hillary herself, who did the smashing.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...
For instance, right wing hacks love to point out the flaws in NYT over and over on thier quest for "media is bad", while ignoring:
* they too are media
* there are just as many examples in their own organization and almost every other
*choosing to play dumb that they choose the examples as part of a targeted smear campaign
For instance, right wing hacks
Hmm
And, they're notoriously obtuse to work with. Remember what they did to Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)?
I'm not interested in defending the NYT. I'm just interested in the judgements of other people about the NYT that seem to me to be, shall we say, a little over the top.
And note: I think it would as true of SSC/SA as the NYT that they seek to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with their worldview. If you speak publically, and don't speak complete jibberish, what else are you doing than seeking to shape public opinion?
There is a less activist way of presenting the news that doesn't attempt to "shape public opinion". I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite. I've read (some of) Manufacturing Consent. Today's media in America (almost all of it, NYT being no exception) heavily shapes public opinion, turning news reporting into a political battleground.
The idea that there are "big commonalities" between these two is a claim that only makes sense given a fairly specific worldview.
While I can understand the worldview that identifies the commonalities and thus finds inconsistencies in the way the NYT covered them both, I also happen to have a worldview in which the two incidents are not fundamentally related at all other than under an extremely broad category, so broad that it's not particularly meaningful. Armed with that worldview, I don't find anything inconsistent in the coverage.
Anyway, I'm a European by birth. I don't buy into the nominal American dream of objective news coverage, not in any way shape or form. Journalistic integrity to me has almost nothing to do with whether one's journalism is free from bias. You can argue that the only meaningful definition is the one claimed by a journalism outlet about its own work, and I think that's fair. But I don't really see anywhere that the NYT claims to to have no worldview that informs and structures its work.
If the NYT is going to brand itself as some paragon of journalistic integrity, I would expect them to be dramatically more consistent with how they choose to cover and editorialize things.
Weiss has her own problems with misleading people too, and I for one was glad to see her leave the NYT and make her positions clearer than they had been in a number of her op-eds for the paper.
What do you mean? All they were going to do was mention his name, which is a very normal thing to do.
The obtuse bit was actually the expectation of Alexander and various SSC fans that they could impose idiosyncratic rules on others that they were in no position to enforce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
Your comment itself is a example of how to mislead with facts.
Which is why, in a court of law, you swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", as selective truth is no truth at all.
Selective choice of facts would seem to be applicable here, as if the vast majority of news at the time was not in favor of the Iraq war and made few bones about it. Perhaps the implication is that as the "paper of record", the NYT is expected to be better than the WSJ, or the Post, or the various news channels? Honestly, is it even worth mentioning how there are now entire spheres of news sources that don't come close to matching even the fairly low standards of the old guard and yet seem to grow day by day?
If you have a problem with misleading news, lies of omission or absent context and your first thought goes to the NYT, I'd say you're missing the forest for a single tree.
I found it tremendously unsatisfying.
This is surely an unfair simplification, but I think, at the heart, it expresses a desire for goodness. A world where people cared about each other and made decisions based on caring about others. (That may sound flippant, and would require more explanation on my part, but I have considered this closely.)
If that is part of the desire driving this project, I can sympathize with that. But I cannot feel much hope for the approach I am struggling to understand from this article.
My alternative suggestion, which again might sound flippant, even more ineffective, boring, or unoriginal, but is also considered and sincere, is to focus on the very small ways we can make tangible goodness for the people we encounter most closely in life. I think it was said better, though, as "love thy neighbor as thyself."
There's a little more to say about all that too, but it would be a good start.
For example, in a court of law, where you have a handful of jurors, some witnesses, a carefully curated set of rules, and highly trained professionals guiding the process. Errors are made. The truth is not always found and an innocent person gets locked up or a guilty one walks free.
Epistemology is an ancient practice. In the western tradition this was first pointed out over 2,000 years ago.
Then there is the problem that human beings are not rational actors and it gets a whole lot messier.
Then we are demonstrating a level of good faith and interest that seems missing in most discourse.
I like the drive behind this - to really get to the bottom of things and promote rational comprehension rather than have people simply sniping at each other with misunderstood datapoints - but I'm not sure a lot of the people who are engaging in such behaviour are really that interested. As mentioned in the article, what they are really after is ammunition.
Still, I welcome this, as it's far better than just throwing up our collective hands and deciding any attempt to improve the quality of public discussion is necessarily censorship.
There's no profit in pursuing "truth" in the face of tenacious anti-truth. Truthiness is an outgrowth of identity. And identity is impervious to logic, reason, facts.
The best we can do is help ourselves navigate the chaos.
It's a real simple checklist:
- Share your work.
- Cite your sources.
- Sign your name.
And then you can start productive analysis, fact checking, verification. Anything less should be treated as gossip, propaganda, or trolling (distraction).
Lastly, I have no idea what to do about identity.
The problem is that journalism stokes the formation of camps by a) conflating ideas and identities, b) bothsidesing everything, and so creating artificial identities to be perceived as neutral, and c) knowingly exploiting that "fear sells" and targeting the identities they manufacture.
Which then becomes ripe pickings for any sociopath out for their own interests.
The only way I'm aware of that can overcome this at scale is forming a larger group identity that's more inclusive. But that only seems to work if there's a large outgroup you can unite against, as far as I can tell.
> Myth: Spinach has a high iron content
> Fact: Spinach does not have a particularly high iron content
... actually tends to reinforce the misconception in readers.
This suggests to me that similar fact-checking content is inherently harmful for their achieving their intended purpose.
The issue is that popular press and "influencers" ignore limitations in studies and always tell just their interpretations while pointing to "the science".
Especially certain subjects where poor, biased, studies seem rife. They take a study and run with it because a scientific study is "science", even if a study is just one step one the way to an accepted truth.
Sometimes is more explicit, cherry-picking certain studies over others; possibly even dismissing those with the "bad" result as biased (or *-ist).
I'm sure all of those studies had merit, had adequate numbers, were peer reviewed and everything... but they were still made with an Agenda, and worse, picked up by the mainstream media so that they could push lifestyle advice, diets, and promote one category of products over another.
The "Truth" is in the middle, of course, and to make a completely opinion based and unscientific statement, too much of anything / overconsumption is a bad thing, but that's too vague a statement or advice; people like being told "avoid doing / eating this" and "do / eat that instead", sticking to simple rules as a lifestyle choice.
What have you been smoking? All words are made up. But that isn't related to the question fact vs interpretation at all. The word "Earth" is made up, your name is made up, "human" is made up, the air that you breathe is made up, yet you are (most likely) a human on Earth, and you'd hate it if that air suddenly disappeared.
Anyway, the quote contradicts itself/reduces itself to ravings of a lunatic, so isn't worth taking seriously.
Contrast that to abstract nouns like "truth", "danger" or "happiness", which are actually interpretations of something other. Statements using these tend to be opinions or non-verifiable. Fact-Checking doesn't work for them.
> "There are no facts, only interpretations.
Too absolute, some things are objective, some subjective.
Not everything is subjective, like he's implying.
The quote sounds deep, but it falls apart to 3rd grade reading comprehension.
I'm still saying Nietzsche is right with the quote. That he is right does not forbid to mentally work with the concept of objectivity. See it more of an invitation to question the objectivity of everything.
Yeah, that doesn't mean anything. The quote taken directly makes it wrong as it conflicts with objectivity, any other interpretation makes it edgy, fanciful, and pointless, as GP pointed out.
> See it more of an invitation to question the objectivity of everything.
That's what everyone already does when they reason through something objective. The quote is un-profound in that interpretation (which imo is reaching)
Not saying they shouldn't be told what to do. Maybe they should.
But the power issue is very clear. They are either too dumb or immoral and need to be told what to do, or they are grown ups and can run their communities however they see fit.
No, I don't think it's that simple. Take the classic culture war issue: abortion. There's genuine, widespread, and deep opposition to it. The "covert interests" didn't manufacture that opposition, but they have latched onto it to help make unpopular policies (e.g. laissez faire economics, tax cuts for the rich) electorally viable.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/14/43208...
This is why every material must point to its source(s), and have full disclosure from the author.
"Information" is not "knowledge". Information can consist of many falsehoods, knowledge should contain few if any falsehoods. We want a decent signal to noise ratio in our information, which requires some base of reliable knowledge.
So I think there's a place for fact checking. This used to be the domain of good reporters, but many of them have shit the bed hard on that for a couple of decades now, and lost most of their credibility. Now is the age of "fact checkers", which aren't doing much better frankly.
population of 100, 84 are vaxxed, 16 are unvaxxed. 2 infected in the vaxxed pool, and 2 infected in the unvaxxed pool. If you then look only at the total infected you can factually claim that 50% of infected are vaccinated and thus peddle whatever grift you want. But even though it's a true statement, it's a gross misrepresentation of reality that hides the important fact that only 2/84 vaxxed people got infected and thus you should get vaccinated.
And that's the world we live in. Those grifters have huge incentives to generate this type of misinformation. Whereas the scientific community has no skin in the game like the grifters to communicate their information. The grifter's statistic is concise, easier to understand and plays into whatever biases the audience has. The scientific person's main job has never been to communicate clearly their findings to a regular audience, and that's where the system fails. Misalignment of incentives. The grifter needs to interact with a regular audience to peddle whatever products/podcasts/supplements for a living and will find these technically true statistics which muddle the water. The science person needs to write grants and papers that get judged by a small slice of society and are mostly confined to interact within a bubble. There's a giant asymmetry here and we don't address it systematically, we just embark on twitter-shouting matches that mostly have the effect of disillusioning the sciences while the grifters walk away with a wad of cash.
Because when people hear "50% of the infected were vaccinated", they're going to misapply the symmetric property and assume 50% of the vaccinated were infected. Even though these are entirely separate things.
Edit: You realize that I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to and providing a slight paraphrase to what he's saying, right?
Then later on admitting half of those admissions weren’t for covid, but for other reasons.
Both sides are citing true facts (“these papers exist”), both sides are wrong (the data is in fact inconclusive)
Using real world examples in this context strikes me as dancing into a mine field and a dismissal of the nuanced exercise towards understanding that the author suggests[2].
[1] https://consilienceproject.org/content/images/size/w1000/202...
[2] https://consilienceproject.org/content/images/size/w1000/202...
The reality of how this number is calculated (eg averages across professions, even though men and women tend to work different professions, part time vs full time is not taken into account) suggests the conclusions that come from this 82 cents number is more nuanced than the initial statement.
Teachers and nannies aren't paid a whole lot because they're easily replaceable, not because they're jobs dominated by women.
Doctors used to be exclusively men. Have salaries gone down now that women make up a significant percent of the number of doctors?
It is a rather sad and naive view of the value of work if you think that it is decided by market value. My work as a developer has a high market value because what I do is generating revenue for my employer. The work of the teacher who shapes the future of our children or the work of nurse that take care of our dying parents don't generate any revenue, and thus has a lower market value, but I, and I think we as a society should, value it much more.
Good teachers and good nannies aren't easier to replace than good carpenters or construction workers. But since many men who are in charge of setting salaries don't understand that they aren't as well paid.
> Have salaries gone down now that women make up a significant percent of the number of doctors?
Yes. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative salaries have gone down when traditionally male professions have been taken over more and more by women.
I'm not sure teachers and nannies are good examples. Public school teachers are largely unionized which would eliminate differences in pay between men and women. And many nannies are effectively small business people who set their own rates.
No, it wouldn't. Why would it?
Teachers are glorified babysitters in the vast majority of instances due to many countries making truancy illegal. Yes, a great teacher is extremely valuable, but the vast majority of teachers are not great because there is not a high demand for great teachers. It’s even worse that we’re ruining the environment for both great teachers and great students by forcing students who have no interest in learning to be there.
economics in general has no answer for this differential temporal factor in value creation vs value capture. it's all predicated on immediate, atomic transactions, although the concept of externalities at least acknowledges the issue.
No. I don't have the time to dig up the sources right now, and I don't remember seeing it specifically about doctors, but in many lines of work the relative salaries have gone up when traditionally male professions have been taken over more and more by women.
"That which can be asserted without evidence..."
and some of the research behind the article: [1]
The article contains quite a few interesting links to research if you are interested to learn more.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over...
[1] https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/223534...
I don't know any nannies, but it's not true that teachers are easily replaceable. Not good ones, anyway.
Good teachers need to show these skills:
* Classroom management (possibly in classes with disturbed kids)
* Curriculum knowledge (requires regular training)
* Social work skills
* Child psychology
* Understanding of various learning impediments
The fact that teachers are cheap is not evidence that they're easily replaced.
It isn't like any other industry hires only "good" people, though, so calling out teaching for that - especially if your area has a shortage - seems a bit unfair.
I suspect that perhaps you are not a teacher, and have never applied for teaching work. Or maybe you live somewhere where school hiring practices are very irresponsible.
My daughter is a teacher who has just changed jobs. The process was something like this:
* Apply (CV, plus extensive covering letter)
* Prospective new head knows old head (they all know one another) so they talk
* Candidate gets an interview, and has to prepare a class
* Interview day: candidate delivers prepared class, observed by head and head-of-year
* Candidate is interviewed at length by a panel of three teachers, including head
* Decision made subject to references
* References taken up; award position
What you've described is a process that isn't even appropriate for a supermarket checkout clerk.
Here in the UK, people have employment rights, including the right not to be dismissed without process. That involves warning the employee twice verbally, putting in place measures to help them improve their performance, and then a final written warning. Teachers here are unionised; they can take their employer to an employment tribunal, which is a kind of court, for the offence of Unfair Dismissal. It takes time and money to fire someone for underperformance.
Consequently recruitment is done rather carefully - more carefully than in many software companies, judging by the calibre of some of the colleagues I've worked with.
FTR I used to be a school governor in a state-run primary school.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over... [2] https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/nation-s-physician-workfo... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59687947
I was responding to the fact that doctors aren't female-dominated right now, a point you missed. Which they aren't. We haven't flooded it with a bunch of women: We have a limited capacity to train doctors. Nor are we getting folks in the market that used to be housewives: That time period has long since moved, though in many places, women still carry household responsibilities in addition to work. Rather than a flood, women are replacing men, mostly. Which is generally how it goes: Women replace men in some fields, and then pay goes down.
from the second link: One of the steadiest movements has been the rise in women as a percentage of the physician workforce: It rose from 28.3% in 2007 to 36.3% last year, according to the AAMC’s Physician Specialty Data Reports from 2008 to 2020:
2007 — 28.3% 2010 — 30.4% 2013 — 32.6% 2015 — 34.0% 2017 — 35.2% 2019 — 36.3%
the above growth rates are not domination unless you're talking about women being dominant.
Do you have some alternative version of "dominated" that I'm not privy to?
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr#:~:text=See%2....
Because evolution did this decision for us. Woman stays with children, while man risk their lives, because those, which did the opposite, lose evolutionary competition.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/infant-death-rates-by-cau...
> Moreover, you will see same numbers as for salary difference.
Is your argument that since there seem to be a correlation between mortality rate for boys and higher salary for men, that there is some kind of causation that make it good? You really have to expand on that if you want to make it comprehensible.
> Natural selection did not stop that, so it's beneficial for society somehow.
Here you reveal that you don't understand natural selection. Natural selection doesn't select for what is beneficial for society at all. Often what is good for the gene is bad for society, and the other way around.
Natural selection works on time scale much longer than the industrial revolution, and most factors are probably older than agriculture. It would be rather stupid to let what was useful behaviour 100k years ago control our lives today. We live in very different environments, in very different societies, and faces very different dangers.
Compare a similar education man and woman: one does construction, the other is a cleaner.
That is absolutely truthful.
I will omit to mention that engine coolant is water.
1. What is said? Do I understand it? Where does it come from?
2. How is it to be understood? How to interpret it?
3. What does it signify? Can it be classified and/or compared with other known things?
4. What can be taken from it? What implications does it have?
Looking at news in this way, it is clearly visible, how most things that are communicated answer 3. and 4., omitting its foundations 1. and 2. Sometimes the bias is created by changing 2.
(The fine-definition of the steps is still in the works. So far, I am very happy with this method. It helps me a lot to understand things and what things are really about. Suggestions?)
They seem to spend a lot of time undermining confidence in fact checkers, to then concede, nearer the end that you have to check facts as part of their new better approach.
The fact checkers I would reference, already do these things, so I don't really see what is being added here except some emotive language that seems to be saying "well, you can prove anything with facts" which feels like it's going in the wrong direction.
Reading all the other comments, there's a strong vibe of "see, I told you I was right to ignore factcheckers".
The old adage about how "dog bites man," may be true but it's not news, whereas "dog bites capitalist oppressor" is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash of exploitation and seized the means of food production in its righteous jaws of justice on behalf of the global oppressed, but by manufacturing the conflict that links the facts, an entirely contrived fabrication qualifies as not entirely un-true.
Simply, just ask whether the facts are used as decoration and plumage for what reduces to an extravagent lie.
It's more than spin, the basic unit of a story is a conflict, and you decorate it with facts. The question is whether the conflict is real, or produced by the logic of a presupposed idea (an ideo-logy). Instead of marxism in the example above, let's take the idea that the world is under the influence or control of evil forces, and you have been selected by God to thwart them, which seems bonkers from the outside, but it's also the theological basis of Christianity. (this is friendly fire) In that view, "dog bites man," becomes, "God smites man," because it has told the story using a conflict that originated in the logic of that idea. This premise that ideology can manufacture conflict that gets decorated with facts to produce stories probably scales pretty well. The decorative facts remain true and even legitimately associated, but the conflict that yields the story might have been fabricated.
Most of us believe that our ideologies are some version of the substrate of reality or the most encompassing set of intellectual abstractions. As I get older, I think the only reliable source of qualitative truth may be laughter because it's involuntary, but even then, that's mostly sentiment. Anyway, thanks for the prompt. Fun thoughts.
1. Misrepresenting the central tendency by presenting outliers as representative.
2. Presenting credentialed but agenda-driven authorities who argue in bad faith to affirm that these outliers are representative and pre-empt the listener's getting a competing, and actually representative, interpretation from other authorities.
If two guys punch each other and then shake hands, but you only publish the “fact” that one of them threw a punch you’re framing the story…with facts.
What we need is humility and good faith.
I mean, even when an article ticks all the boxes for being well researched, factually correct, neutral in language, even then it can be misleading for not having a counter-point (for example), or its hosting platform to de-emphasize the article.
What has more impact, a headline saying "tinfoil hats cause headaches" prominently posted on the front page of a newspaper in big impact font, or a byline four pages in?
I'll give you naivety though.
Looks like a magazine, elegant, no cruft.
This increasingly common use of the word "weaponize" (as a dysphemism for "utilize") bothers me, as does the article's use of the phrase "information war."
As horrible as it is to spread disinformation and propaganda, it seems unnecessarily extreme to describe that as analogous or comparable to warfare or physical violence.
100% of commenters to your comment at the time of writing this comment linked to wikipedia, STATISTICALLY PROVING that they are shills of Big Wiki.
Obviously there is literal information warfare in the sense of state funded propaganda and disinformation campaigns.
But that doesn’t seem to explain most of what I observe, which seems a lot more to do with vastly increased access to contradictory information as a result of the internet, coupled with a lack of institutional transparency. That doesn’t look like ‘war’ to me, but rather just that our institutions haven’t adapted to the presence of the internet yet.
The solution'd seem to be to have cultural dialogs, e.g. on politics, occur on platforms where optimal strategies are constructive. This is, where deceptive strategies would lose out to honest ones.
- what seems like a fact may not be a "fact" at all, it may be a misunderstanding
- knowing all the known facts may give you a false sense of understanding of the truth; one more fact can change your entire outlook... and yet one more can change that... you don't know the facts you don't know
If certain truths are probable, the facts known today (or perceived as knowable today) should not get in the way of exploring them.
Do not let any fact or a collection of facts get in the way of your exploration of the truth.
If one is extremely conservative, it may seem like a good idea to only stick to what is already known (i.e. the "facts") but even then, because of the fact that you can never be sure that everything there is to know is known at this time, one should still keep an open mind.
You can be open to new evidence defining what objective truth is without dismissing the existence of objective truth due to unknown unknowns.
"Why is it morally superior to protect life?"
Because I like it. Because it's life's prime directive to perpetuate life and I am a lifeform. Mumblemumblegod. Pick whatever you like. :)
It's kinda funny because you're making conjectures that are explicitly addressed in the book.
Imagine two friends, Alice and Bob. Alice thinks COVID is not a problem. Doesn't mask, hasn't had a single shot, all the rest. Bob is terrified of COVID. Masks up at home, space bubble helmet outside, all the rest.
The only outcome that works is Alice and Bob agreeing that they have different risk preferences. That they each should live their lives in accordance, but that they have no right to force each other to adopt the same behaviors. Bob gets used to doing a lot of stuff over Zoom, and Alice gets used to doing a lot more Zoom calls than she did before.
What if, instead, Bob tries to force the entire world to wear masks all the time, and undergo an endless stream of boosters, all in order to satisfy his risk preference? Alice will respond in-kind, and now we're in a tit-for-tat situation. Endless retaliation.
Now, imagine that Bob has political power, and can mandate his desires into law. Bob has now used deadly force -- the police -- to coerce Alice into doing what he wants.
Alice, being a big fan of consent, is having none of it... and that's where we are today.
Same would be true if the roles were reversed.
1. There actually was a law requiring individuals "wear masks all the time".
2. There actually was a law requiring individuals to get an "endless stream of boosters".
3. Alice respected the boundaries of private businesses that made wearing respiratory protection or vaccination a requirement of associating with them.
4. Alice respected personal preferences of people wearing respiratory protection, rather than violating their personal space or perhaps even assaulting them.
5. Alice paid the costs of her own healthcare, and/or her "insurance" company were efficient enough to charge for her expected increased costs.
6. Healthcare providers were able to freely disassociate with Alice as to not have an undue burden on their resources due to the results of Alice's choices.
7. Alice displayed rational recognition of the scientific and legal realities she was dealing with, rather that irrational rejection of such.
8. Alice displayed some understanding of historical precedents, as pandemics are infrequent events that only appear novel.
I'm a libertarian, so if you want to discuss practical ways of making it so that different value judgements can coexist, I'm all for it. It starts with acknowledging the existing non-independence like the points I listed, and will generally be about nuanced corrections to the medical consensus rather than wholesale rejection. But really, it's fallacious to frame the larger situation as being about individual freedom when the overriding characteristic is political herd behavior. What has really happened is an abrupt change in prevailing conditions, combined with professional political machines preaching simplistic easy answers that play to peoples' biases.
I've found that a lot of people think of the masks like a gas mask - supposed to keep everything bad out. They are more like the breath guard at the salad bar - keeping you from exhaling droplets six feet in front of you.
Bob's mask protects Alice more than it protects Bob.
Edit: also, I do agree that keeping stuff out of the air is preferable to filtering it after the fact (especially with mucous membranes etc). This concern is addressed somewhat by (3), and also by the additional point that Alice needs to demonstrate empathy of understanding and respecting Bob's choice as well.
Edit: I appreciate your thorough and patient response to the parent comment.
For pandemic usage when I need to filter my exhale, I disabled the check valves by popping the mask apart, removing all 3 valve flaps, and sealing up the output hole. This makes air flow through the filters bidirectionally. I've also seen a 3d-printed adapter for the 6100 series (I think) that attaches a third filter to the output. Separate input and output filters is probably a better way to go.