Consensus not censorship
interfluidity.com
interfluidity.com
Truth by consensus is logical but not the point to which we have evolved. Here it seems like a retreat from our capacity into a pragmatic defensive stance. This is all we can manage.
This is essentially the Overton Window. Truth as managed by mainstream sensibility. And the mainstream is primarily a point of view that does not question our industrial imperialism. Things that subtract a lot from growth are not included.
And there is the potential disaster. Large parts of our history do not match our mainstream perception of national character at all. In fact, the mainstream view is one of intentional avoidance of facts. Dissent has never been mainstream. The forces of social change are not supported by the majority.
Example: The Overton Window does not include Chris Hedges. In fact, it doesn't really include any of the real investigative journalists or honest historians of our time. The most curious and informed people we should be promoting are too subversive to be mainstream. And so they will not be included in a truth consensus.
What then is that 'consensus' if it's too shallow to feature its experts?
Something like that. Sunday morning shouting into the void.
The author makes a mistake by projecting their world view onto others. The author believes authority can be derived via consensus, I do too, but the people who spread "misinformation" believe authority is derived via might (by their king, whether it is Putin, Xi, or otherwise), or via god (as interpreted by their religious leaders).
If I believe authority is derived from academics, how am I supposed to share a world view with someone who believes authority is derived from their pastor? If there is a policy that is directly derived from these differences in beliefs about authority (global warming, evolution, abortion, election integrity, education indoctrination policy), how can consensus be reached?
Thus what we are seeing as misinformation is a much much deeper problem. Misinformation is the manifestation of fundamentally incompatible axioms about the world and how information is determined to be true.
The true danger is where this line of thought leads, because if two people have irreconcilable, incompatible views of the world they must choose to live in a cold war, or annihilate the other. That is why genocide happens. That is why Russia is trying to erase Ukraine and China is trying to erase Uighers.
A professor in a certain type of engineering, getting grant money by claiming it might be useful for e.g. future computing hardware, has an incentive to keep claiming so in order to get future grants.
I think I'd trust a pastor's word on their area of nominal expertise (life advice, christianity) about as much as a given professor's word about their area of specialization. (This doesn't apply to a pastor of one of those super-churches, for example; they're obvious scum. I wonder if there's an analogue in academia?)
Tithing alone creates a situation where any pastor is extremely aligned with doing anything at all to prevent questioning of god, including using social pressure. Social leverage (we'll take away your friends if you don't do what we say) has absolutely been used by many different churches. There are entire communities from people who have come from abusive church systems like LDS after having lost their social connections. I have direct personal stories of multiple people in my life directly harmed by their [parents] churches because it's more important to be a part of the church than to maintain a relationship with your child.
It's not hard to look at the teachings of Jesus, which are respectable (love thy neighbor, feed the poor, etc), and look how aptly those who claim to be most religious took those lessons. Nobody who is christian in values (believes in Jesus lessons rather than the abstract idea of Jesus) would vote for Trump and yet I don't think it is a stretch to say zealous Christians preferred Trump. When I grew up in the church, they said it was time to stand in front of the congregation and confirm your baptism and say that you believe in god. I wasn't convinced, and so the pastor told me I was going to be doomed to a life of crime if I didn't get confirmed. "Don't bear false witness" but do stand in front of the church and directly lie about your beliefs. Immediate contradiction, immediately obvious that the church is not primarily concerned with truth. I might not know what's true, but I know for sure contradictions are false.
I don't think it makes sense to trust a pastor who depends on your relationship with the church for their paycheck with life advice over someone who has studied the causes/treatments for divorce, depression, or anything else. There are many stories of pastors trying to keep people who should divorce together for the sake of the church. Pastors probably have more experience than the average person, but probably don't have better outcomes than those derived via research and I certainly wouldn't trust them to write federal legal policy. I definitely believe there are probably many pastors who are much better than many other mental health professionals, and are probably much more accessible both mentally and monetarily, so pastors probably have a net positive effect in this area.
It wouldn't even surprise me if seminary school were to directly teach many topics academically or use academic methods and authority, but it's still done in the context of tithing and one truth (god exists) that is beyond critical examination, the yes is presupposed.
Just to be clear, I think there are churches that improve the world and many offer things that are otherwise missing in [american] society like a sense of community. I spent a lot of time traveling and many countries do not have a semblance of "the golden rule," which results in a low trust society. I highly suspect Christianity is a major driver of teaching the golden rule in America.
> This doesn't apply to a pastor of one of those super-churches
And that is the crux of the issue. You can't put yourself in a member of their congregations shoes and apply the same line of thought to them. That person is in their congregation so they probably trust that church with life advice and christian authority. The megachurch person is to you, as you are to me.
> Hypothesize -> experiment -> measure -> conclude
With the replication crisis, it's become clear that these systems have serious problems determining truth once you're dealing with something less concrete than engineering. I put a lot of stock in what physicists say about physics; I don't believe there's as much rigor in political science (as scientific as the DPRK is democratic) or women's studies. I expect that as you move from physics through the social sciences, you get less and less attached to reality. "Publish or perish" and the increasing political repression on university campuses both cause perverse incentives that lead to me discounting the truth-value of most things I see coming out of universities.
>Tithes
Monetarily speaking, universities are a plague on the world- especially America. Imagine a world where you had to give 30,000+ dollars to the church in order to get a decent job. You might nominally learn something at the institution you go to, but learning is the ~3rd most important reason why anyone goes to university- they go for the piece of paper certifying they have an IQ above 90, so they can get a job; they go to party and meet new people, and because they were told they should go by society; and lastly, some want to learn things. You know that universities aren't actually selling knowledge because a) it's very rare for someone to sneak into Harvard to attend a lecture, and b) universities put their lectures up online for free!
>I certainly wouldn't trust them to write federal legal policy
Neither would I; in fact, they shouldn't, it adds more perverse incentives that corrupt the field. I don't want scientists directing government policy for the same reason- it adds an incentive for the power-hungry to be even more careerist. I assume you've heard the quip that the modern researcher spends half their time playing politics and filling out grant forms?
>so pastors probably have a net positive effect in this area.
>It wouldn't even surprise me if seminary school were to directly teach many topics academically or use academic methods and authority, but it's still done in the context of tithing and one truth (god exists) that is beyond critical examination, the yes is presupposed.
Sure, if you're an atheist religion's not for you. Similarly, if you're republican university's increasingly not for you; if the truth were to disagree too much with the political agenda, so much the worse for the truth- in a manner quite reminiscent of a church, actually!
>The megachurch person is to you, as you are to me.
Again, I'm not religious. And given your trust of modern academia, I'd say the same to you ;)
Russia is trying to erase Ukraine because it feared it would succumb to western influence. China is trying to erase Uyghurs because they believe they pose a separatist or terrorist threat. This is not about belief or misinformation, these are calculated political goals.
I'd like to see some evidence this is true and not just the author having a much smaller bubble, which he compared with some subset of the mainstream he had access to and paid attention to, and now having access to more bubbles which reveals the insanity that was always there.
this is the critical part.
only with consensus is it possible to try things, and fix failures without shaming those that supported the idea.
elsewhere the author mentions multi party systems as an improvement over the two party situation. well, yes, but, in the end, any party system makes consensus difficult. even when there are coalitions, they mostly mean that one party agrees to support one issue against their own interests if the other party will support one of theirs. this kind of vote trading is not helpful.
really the only way to get consensus is to completely abolish the concept of parties altogether.
it's the same issue with unions. they are necessary today because employers do not act in the best interest of their employees. but unions and employers are in a constant struggle fighting each other, and consensus is not possible. but only consensus is able to ensure that a company operates to everyones benefit.
This game beautifully explains the prisoners dilemma. At first it might not seem relevant, but after playing the game I think you will see.
From a game theory perspective bad faith actors that are not punished create more bad faith actors. So if your model of information does not involve the idea of defection (lying for self enrichment) vs cooperation (trying to achieve mutual understanding) and how the defectors are punished (or at the very least not rewarded), then the philosophical foundation is shaky. Bad faith actors exist and must be accounted for directly without hand waviness. This article has a presumption of desired mutual understanding but fails to account for those who benefit the most from chaos or from those who have incompatible first principals to your own.
Dominance agnostic political ideas are contradictory, because much in the same way Kant's categorical imperative defines a contradiction, political ideas that are not able to maintain dominance are contradictory, since a more dominant party will destroy it. That's why countries have militaries.
As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest members of your society own all the media, all the business, and have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of the chaos. When things get bad enough all of the rich people buy a house in New Zealand to escape the chaos.
How do you defeat that?
Consensus based systems assume that bad actors make up less than 50% of the political power. As long as that is true, Consensusville should be able to fight off the chaos from bad actors
The categorical imperative would only forbid the people of Authorityville to spread chaos in Consensusland. It has no intrinsic contradiction as it is not a strategy for conflict resolution and you would need to adhere to it in dominant and not dominant positions.
There are just some wrong premises for misinformation. Misinformation is fought best with free information. There are untrue statements about the economics of misinformation and that it would win against free information because it is easier to produce. I believe this is empirically wrong and has lead us to wrong conclusion who best to combat it. And this will result in less ability to form consensus and also less trust.
one of many beautifully written lines. An outstanding essay for the quality of thinking and writing
This is a good idea, but you don't need a "permissioned blockchain" whatever that is. Just use git.
For instance, you have traditional moderation. No hate speech etc. It works fine. Then you see that your comment was removed but it was only a dissenting opinion. You can then prove to others they removed it. The idea is to keep the authority in check through transparency.
This also works well for promises of discounts, overbooking of tickets, non-spoofable reviews, etc.
Edit: Oh this got followed up on Paul's direction is a little different than expected; Ii has come out a little less self sovereign than I expected. But, here's[2] Vitra. His follow up.ppst talks about Execution Transparency[3].
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/pfrazee/status/146248993373472359...
[2] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/smart-contracts-without-blockc...
[3] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/execution-transparency-hosted-...
Really git has too many features, and too little publishing features that prevent repudiation.
What I must say though, while the article is interesting, it certainly does not feel well written to me. While I am not a native speaker, I consider myself a fairly good english reader at this point. Still I found the language chosen to be very inaccessible. To me it felt like some words and phrases where deliberatly chosen to sound smart. To understand some of the paragraphs, I had to look up so many words that I had to start over reading, because I lost context. I think this topic could benefit from some more simple english.
https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-...
Misinformation is downstream from retrograde political views and basic historical literacy. The solution isn't a better media ecosystem. It's better social relations.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
> Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States.
> It is still Marxist doctrine that the “capitalist” countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans.
> Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man.”
>Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional society in a way that it now does not.
False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these statements are always followed with naive, juvenile, authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this article.
By definition.
Let's say that people think MD5 is a good cryptographic hash function. The worst single possible thing you can do is ban-hammer the promoters of this idea away. This is extremely dumb "Kill The Messenger" thinking, the promoters of those idea are exposing real communication problems (namely, the use of "hash function" to denote roughly similar concepts but are also very different in very important details). What you do, if you really think this Md5-is-cryptographically-secure problem is serious, is that you treat the success of the promoters of this false idea as a measure for how hard you failed to communicate basic cryptography to software devs. Do a modification to your education\media ecosystem, then measure how successful the false prophets are, if their success goes up or stays constant then you still haven't addressed the real problem, if it goes down then you're successfully fighting "misinformation", repeat till you drive their popularity to the ground.
I can today start for pennies an ad and bot campaign targeting 100s of millions of people claiming that the earth is square and that n0tth3dro1ds is on the payroll from the establishment to claim otherwise.
I must have the right to say whatever bs I want. But I don't think that I can demand the right to have a powerful platform to distribute my nonsense.
Why is the solution censorship rather than better analysis and consensus mechanisms?
I think you’re ignoring the second-order effects of mass censorship eg, the Thailand study [1] suggests vaccine censorship and failure to address concerns may have been a catastrophic mistake. We need to seek consensus through discussion and debate — to avoid lying to ourselves and thus engaging in horrors.
How is that worse than Yellow Journalism?
By making no distinction between (picking an obviously repulsive view) a post that outlines someone’s argument why they believe black people are predisposed to be thieves and some photoshopped stock photo of a black kid stealing watermelon and fried chicken with the caption “ni**, right?” [1] we just let hate, and the irl consequences, spread while choking off actual speech. You kill the very thing you wanted to protect with free speech in the first place.
Free speech should be measured in “freedom as in liberty” instead of “freedom as in anarchy.”
[1] This was, not even exaggerated, real content you could find on some now banned subreddits, one of them rhymes with moon town.
Imagine by John Lennon is a great example that caused many to ban him for suggesting a world without religion was ideal while others are emotional moved by it.
You used like half a dozen adjectives in a two word sentence to express your discontent with censorship without advancing any point.
Any real discussion would need to leave the ideology behind and ask some actual questions. Why is censorship bad? (rather than making the trivially wrong assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is a censor). Why should free speech be absolute, rather than differential, how does that relate to the abundance of information and modern technologies abuse of it etc.
Dogmatic belief in free speech just reveals that no thinking is going on. It's a sacred cow, just like democracy or the meaningless phrase 'freedom', any criticism of which gets the same response you get from devout Muslims if you were to criticize the Quran.
'Free speech' itself is ironically enough a loaded phrase that tries to suffocate any view that dares to be anything less than 'free' right from the outset. Rhetorically everyone who disagrees is already "unfree" by definition, and what kind of barbarian wants that?
His point regarding free speech is that, in the current world, bad faith speech, self-serving speech and the suspicion that speech could be bad-faith or self-serving, are breaking our ability to reach consensus. This is bad because it immobilizes politics unless someone 'wins' which only serves to mobilize the faction who 'lost'.
But that's just not true.
It's true that there is no easy solution, but that's because it's an education problem. When Bob and Steve think Infowars is a more reliable source of information than the journal Nature, Bob and Steve are just wrong, and we shouldn't help them make other people also-wrong, and we probably should try to prevent them from confusing other people too.
It's relatively easy to learn enough science to be able to correctly distinguish the 10% most extreme dis/mis-information. The amount of effort we're putting into getting people just to that level, as a society, is extremely low.
He was correct.
This particular individual has said many other things during and about the pandemic, and this was part of a much broader line of messaging that was, broadly speaking, both incorrect and harmful.
(I'm a biochemist, and immunology and extracellular vesicles are my areas of expertise. No conflict of interest.)
Whether your immunology research finds applications, a hospital gets acquired instead of wound down, or an N95 factory gets built can be a few parameters pushed through a model. Parameters dictated by sentiment.
Do I still think they should still be able to have an outlet? Yes, I do. Just like every other publications, individuals and outlets banned by Twitter, FB, and Youtube.
When you start to do this, you've drifted into censoring people rather than misinformation. You can't censor things that are true for fear that they'll embolden forces that you are against. Well you can, but that's a dictatorship.
> It doesn't stop infection. Or transmission. Don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity,
"Don't think of it as a vaccine" is trivially false, as it is literally a vaccine. "terrible side effect profile" is false: we now have data that shows at population-scale the vaccine was overwhelmingly effective with minimal side-effects. (We knew that before then, too; anyone looking at the efficacy rates knew it before it hit the gen pop.)
"that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS": that's how nearly all vaccines work, yes. Your body can't really fight an infection with the effects of the vaccine that it hasn't had the time to produce the corresponding antibodies for. (AIUI, rabies is the exception to this, where you can be vaccinated after infection, but that's due to rabies being a very slow moving infection.)
"It doesn't stop infection. Or transmission." And the rest of the tweet is just misleading: nothing is guaranteed in life, but we can look at the probabilities and risks associated with and without the vaccine and know which choice has a lower risk profile, and make a sane recommendation based on that. Wearing your seat belt can't stop death in a car accident, but it is still a good idea. Tweets like these very likely drove people to not get vaccinated, leading to either them dying, or them passing it on to someone who did.
Using some small technicalities around things that cannot be guaranteed not being guaranteed to try to push a bad policy and decision making is not "correct". The evaluation of risk here in the tweet is absurdly bad.
Whether Twitter should be forced to promulgate such idiocy is a conversation that's been had many times since on HN, but it is idiocy.
So soon we forgot the original whistleblower who shared the news of covid to the west and then China censored him..
Many doctors/nurse personnel had medical licenses removed because they spoke against the narrative. Doctors with 30 / 40 years experience being told if you don't parrot what we are saying we are going to make a case that will remove your doctor title. Now we can say 99% of doctor support this.. It was sad seeing doctors twist the truth on tv. As the virus changed trying to stick to the narrative became more difficult.
That last paragraph does not match what I saw in most of the world. In particular, this perspective does not really match what happened in Canada, the US, or Europe, at least not in the way I think you are suggesting.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/canada...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6440227
4 doctors landmark hearing https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/8517353/cana...
As far as I can tell, these are all examples of serious breaches of this duty. These physicians didn't just accidentally cross some fuzzy line, or slip off a tight rope. They were way off in their conduct. Heck, with the exception of one, they apparently didn't even show up in court.
In all of the above cases, it is the public and the patients who are being protected.
If people do things that can hurt other people, and these other people don't have a say in the matter, then with the exception of certain fiduciary-like situation, that's not okay.
Parents have claimed religious exceptions to performing recommended medical procedures and inoculations since the dawn of modern medicine, and sought out alternative treatments. The same parents who would try to cure autism by bleach injections are the same ones who would just as readily practice Mesmerism or whatever other 18th century nonsense you can think of.
The only difference is that instead of a stranger coming to town in a tent, like something out of Blood Meridian, it's some glowing words on a box.
Yes, and these are often allowed. However, there are guardrails. Hospitals have multidisciplinary teams of lawyers, ethicists, psychologists and religious counsellors to ensure that these are legitimate beliefs and that risks are within certain boundaries.
You can't exactly apply the same care to the internet at large.
You want to take a guess at how often an old order Amish child goes to the pediatrician?
But as with anything, you have to think about how things scale. The Amish are a small fraction of the population, and there's no imminent danger that suddenly everyone will take up the behaviour and stop taking their children to the paediatrician. Amish videos aren't "trending" on TikTok. :)
If ever there was, or if that happened, then we might have a crisis on our hands, and we might be talking about doing something about it.
None of this happens in a vacuum, nor should it be considered as if it did.
If it's a mainstream belief that the whole of climate science is a secret marxist plot to undermine capitalism, then is it really that weird to suggest those same marxists are faking school schootings?
1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1].
2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2]
3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3]
Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement.
There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports.
Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on.
Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able to minimize the issues to a small number of incidents). The UK government were briefed, who then briefed the press. The press (including the BBC) hyped it up by including people who thought the world would end, and people who were preparing for the worst. When not a lot of issues occurred, people have been decrying that Y2K was fake, in part because of the way the media overhyped the issues and failed to properly convey the potential problems to readers/viewers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Media_po...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815
[3] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-balance-in...
This is true, but the fringe and the tail-end are by far the easiest problem to solve. It's what I decided to focus on, because it seems like people can't even agree that it's a problem in the extremes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
Or has Infowars started a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people which I haven't happened to read about?
What other system of publication would have prevented these things?
How is infowars protected from things like this, and how can anyone argue that it has an overall better track record?
> What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it. As a small protest, I put a sign on my desk that said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It was New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst’s supposed line to artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the “crisis” there before the Spanish-American War. I don’t think my editors even noticed the sign.
So no, this wasn't just poor old Judy, who provided a convenient scapegoat. You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no special recognition. Whereas the flagship paper sends goons with golfclubs to threaten writers into following the narrative.
The original comment I'm responding to asks for examples of corporate media being more wrong for longer. If starting a literal war 15 years ago doesn't count I'm not sure what you're looking for.
Except in a universe where there are no news organizations and only blogs, then blogs will naturally attain a similar amount of influence, but with even fewer checks and balances, and probably lesser liability/responsibility. This is just a natural consequence of the graph-theoretic properties of social networks.
If we agree that the media started the war (just for the sake of argument), then yes, it does count, it seriously counts and it counts for a lot. But you've selected one of the most extreme examples, in a sea of otherwise unremarkable examples. When we talk about an org's track record, we're not hoping to find zero mistakes: we're really hoping to find relatively few mistakes, and accountability and recognition of important mistakes. Also perhaps a self-correction mechanism.
I'm not saying any of that is perfect, but legitimate news orgs do have some of that.
So you're asserting that without The NYT, the Iraq war would have never happened at all? I'm not sure how else to interpret your claims.
You're not necessarily wrong -- I don't know -- but don't mistake relative influence for relative inaccuracy. I suspect -- but don't know -- that giving Infowars the amount of influence you're citing here would result in a tragedy of at least similar scale.
edit: The world moves towards wingnuttery when outlets like the NYT knowingly (but deniably) lie about very important things, and make it clear that they would do the exact same thing again by not accepting responsibility. Then you've left the public completely adrift. Why not listen to Infowars? The worst they could be are liars.
Meanwhile onlookers are loosing faith in his "opposition". Naturally...
> She worked in The New York Times' Washington bureau before joining Fox News in 2008.
Some shade being thrown by wikipedia there.
It seems relevant that she literally outed a CIA agent, at the express request of the Republican President's team, to maintain a fictional reason they had invented for starting a war. The President then later commuted the sentence of the person involved, when their appeal failed, and they later got pardoned by Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Libby
I'd suggest this perhaps points to the root of the problem being in neither wingnut TV shows, nor The New York Times, but somewhere deeper. When Oliver North and other people who betray their country are getting fat checks to spout lies on Fox News, then really what hope is there for truth to prevail.
edit to add: minor but totally typical detail, the guy who leaked the CIA agent's info, got his licence to practice law back, because this same Judith Miller, claimed that her initial testimony was a mistake. There's just no consequences for lying.
- "banning books because they criticize the government"
- "banning books because they have immoral content"
And on the other hand:
- "shutting down a viral video with advice dangerous to individuals, where protecting the public from direct physical harm is the goal"
I don't know of any instances in History where we looked back at the latter in disapproval.
> "those who do the silencing usually end up silencing their own critics"
I'm not even sure that this usually happens. It is certainly the case that when that happens, it is very memorable. But that's probably just a "selective attention bias" applied to History, that is, because the other cases are unremarkable.
I'd say "viral videos" are too recent to be part of History yet, but shutting down a dangerous viral video is not very far from "banning immoral content", which is not very far itself from "banning hate speech".
It's not that easy to draw a line because it is a continuum.
Consensus and censorship is what many countries do: People vote for MPs, MPs vote laws against hate speech, pornography, etc. Or at least how it's supposed to work on the paper.
The same way, we could decide for laws against media that propagates misinformation - and a judge would decide. We could do that. The tools are on the workbench, why we can't use them is another problem.
The way this works is that there are some questions that have clear answers. For example, anthropogenic climate change (or to be more precise, the idea that "Most of the warming of Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century has been caused by human activities."). The middle ground fallacy is what you call it when you put up two people on TV, one who is an expert on climate change, and another who is just a contrarian, and where you don't frame it exactly as it is: one is wrong and the other is right.
That's not the same thing as this conversation we're having.
(Of course, any media that gave the details wasn't wrong at any time. But the simplified advice still was.)
https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=editorial
Many of the editorials seem approximately apolitical, e.g. "Get childhood immunizations back on track after COVID" or "Protecting the ocean requires better progress metrics". People of most any political stripe could have written them. If the editorials were all like this, Nature would look impressively unbiased.
Then there are a bunch of editorials that are obviously political, but in a science-adjacent sort of way. "Equity must be baked into randomized controlled trials" has a very pious vibe to it, though thankfully it also has some obvious points about RCT design thrown in. "Europe must not backslide on climate action despite war in Ukraine" contains some legitimate information, but its message would not play well for most of the ideological spectrum. At one point there's an article titled "Science must overcome its racist legacy" and subtitled "We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation."
Finally, there's a category of editorial that's just taking a stand on [insert current hot-button topic here] and sprinkling in enough science mentions to lend it an air of authority. The endorsement of Joe Biden falls squarely in this category (I read the whole thing to make sure), as does the condemnation of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
So, yes: Nature's editorial section is a completely one-sided ideological monoculture. You can tell that it's mostly one-sided just by scanning the article titles, but the true magnitude becomes apparent when you read the articles themselves: there's no serious attempt made to persuade, nor to rebut the usual counterarguments. It's unmistakably preaching to the choir, and I can't help but think that this reflects a lack of people at Nature willing or able to play devil's advocate.
Not sure how much this affects the non-editorial part of Nature, but man, it makes me suspicious. Which is very bad for Nature's credibility. If I were in charge, I think I would either get rid of the editorials entirely or move them to a semi-adversarial back-and-forth format like the monthly discussions at Cato Unbound (which has a strong ideological bent but has a format that prevents it from being one-sided.)
It is not exactly a secret that science itself supports more left-leaning ideas than right-leaning ideas (depending on what exactly we're talking about and where the Overton window is at a point in time or at a specific place on earth). I think this has less to do with whether left or right is fundamentally right or best. Unfortunately, a lot of what passes as "the right" these days is just... a bit crazy. Of course they had to take a stand for Biden, the only other choice was a lunatic. Love him or hate him, one thing Trump is, objectively, is a bullshitter (in the academic sense of the word). And scientists really just don't like bullshit.
If you get the feeling that Nature is politically biased (and I mean this in the usual everyday person sense, because of course any politics that affects science will be met with strong views), I think that should serve as a signal to check what your biases are.
Remember that the people reading this are all the top experts in their own fields, so you can bet they'd love to write back and argue if some editor wrote something stupid. It simply is the case that the publication is of exceptional quality, and that for the most part, people who read Nature are not people who care about political nonsense.
There was an obvious third option: not endorsing anyone. There's no law that requires every publication to endorse a presidential candidate. In fact, most of them don't do that.
>If you get the feeling that Nature is politically biased (and I mean this in the usual everyday person sense, because of course any politics that affects science will be met with strong views), I think that should serve as a signal to check what your biases are.
I'm sorry, but this feels like gaslighting. GP has listed numerous examples of editorials that were biased in favor of a certain political platform, including an explicit endorsement of a presidential candidate. I really don't understand how, in spite of that, you could arrive at the conclusion they aren't politically biased.
>Remember that the people reading this are all the top experts in their own fields, so you can bet they'd love to write back and argue if some editor wrote something stupid.
Only if they don't mind committing a career suicide.
Disagreeing with other scientists is not going to lead to career suicide. It's pretty much the norm.
Which is why when there is a scientific consensus that forms, it tends to be mainly the crazy ones who do bad science that go against the grain. And oftentimes their career is doing just fine, because in science we really value academic freedom.
The public has a very distorted view of this, mainly informed by bad priors and odd examples.
In the late 1800s, the term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe completely fake news published by Hearst and Pulitzer. (There were good yellow journalists on both sides.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
People seem to think that we had general consensus in the 1950s. Watching TV was easier than reading and had better pictures than radio. Yes, the television news tri-opoly of the time managed to feed Americans more or less the same pap. People were told the same "news" and told to buy the same products. Unless those people lived in the south, of course.
https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-ri...
I reject this forced consensus. I don't want the public to be fed propaganda for another cold war and like it (thanks, TV's big 3!). I'd rather have a thinking public that gets lots of things wrong and rarely agrees than a captive, mesmerized public that thinks "all the right things" because someone told them to.