How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
For question one, I would separate it into two questions. We have all been fed a whole lot of bullshit; it’s the nature of modern America (and perhaps the world). It seems inescapable. The crux becomes the second part; are they not weighing facts properly. That’s a lot harder to answer. I think of my MAGA friends; they very aggressively feel they weigh facts properly while I think they do not. The question becomes one of fundamental worldview and foundational beliefs. It seems insurmountable.
For question two, yes. But, not just one campaign. Many. From many sources. TikTok, for example. Is TikTok a disinformation campaign? Is it just a vehicle for information and disinformation? It seems apparent that it is at least nominally a tool of the Chinese government that curates the content.
For question three, if one seeks out information that only conforms to a previously held worldview and beliefs. MAGA is a good example; it appears that MAGAs broadly only accept info that confirms what they believe and reject info to the contrary. We are all guilty of it to one degree or another. Seems to be human nature.
For question four, if there is information upon which would cause you to change/alter worldview and foundational beliefs, I would say your conclusions may be solid. Although this is far from absolute. I try to balance sources of information and ignore the edge cases. But I certainly have my biases. For example, when Boebert (who “lives” supposedly, at least for Congressional districting purposes, in the county next to mine) speaks, I assume she is full of shit and disregard everything she has to say.
All of this is very concerning to me and I think it should be to every citizen. It seems as if we live in a post-fact age, where truth (my truth, your truth, everyones truth) carries more weight than facts.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Carl Sagan is one of my personal heroes:
What’s in the baloney detection kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.
What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and — especially important — to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true.
Among the tools:
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.â€Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities†have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,†has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy. *Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
The reliance on carefully designed and controlled experiments is key, as I tried to stress earlier. We will not learn much from mere contemplation. It is tempting to rest content with the first candidate explanation we can think of. One is much better than none. But what happens if we can invent several? How do we decide among them? We don’t. We let experiment do it. Francis Bacon provided the classic reason:
But we also have to remember that Truth (The Actual Truth) 100% depends upon where you sit.
Right now the US economy if one looks at stocks and job reports is pretty good.
However that viewpoint skews based upon the individual:
Jaime Dimon ,CEO of JP Morgan yep things look pretty good
A person who is Gig worker, that was recently downsized, who does not own any stock, might think differently as they go through a 15 hour day working 2 jobs with no benefits and is being stretched by inflation.
Both would be saying the “Truth” on their viewpoint of the economy.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Look at almost any of your posts on here. They are indicative of brainwashing.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Look at almost any of your posts on here. They are indicative of brainwashing.
Oh, the irony.
Three classic responses to the age-old problem of viewing the world through our own biases come to mind:
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“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” – John Kenneth Galbraith, Professor of Economics, Harvard University
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Even a field as ruthlessly objective as Physics: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it…” – Max Planck
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Our brains are wired to make deeply-held beliefs nearly impossible to change:
About 30 of my co workers did a 3 week hotel isolation quarantine in mid 2020. One of the guys came out a raving MAGA cultist and Covid conspiracy believer. He must have watched a lot of TV / YouTube.
It took about 4 weeks of brutal feedback before he realised that he had been “brainwashed”, for lack of a better term.
Friends, family and co workers can help, but some people will never recognise disinformation.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Interesting questions.
If I can answer with an observation, going back to my early years I learned that I was fed a lot of bullshit because it shocked my mind and conscience. There’s a Thomas Paine quote on this, something to the effect of, any belief system that shocks the mind of a child cannot be true. That was my experience. Pentacostal Christian school and church pumped me full of more shocking bullshit than I care to remember. It was a mixed blessing in a way because it made me ask these same questions about who to trust and how to know that what you’re being told is true. I was a smart and curious kid but feral and rebellious. I needed explanations, not just answers. Answers were bullshit without valid explanations. I stopped looking to authority figures as experts and looked for expertise as authority figures. Fast forward 40 something years and I’m still atheistic, humanistic, politically moderate, open to new ideas and willing to challenge my own perceptions of things. I consume information constantly and am loathe to wade into conversations that require specific knowledge of the topic before offering opinions (my daily trigger, if I had to pick one, is people who argue topics they know almost nothing substantial about). To reference another quote, attributed to whom I can’t say: the gut is not the seat of wisdom. George Will, maybe?
Ultimately I think that way of thinking has led me to draw fairly sound conclusions about things and keeps me tethered to reality. Science can be corrupted by bad people but the process generally points true north given enough time and repetition.
There is absolutely a disinformation campaign happening now, probably multiple on multiple fronts. The obvious being the GOP whitewashing of Donald Trump. What are the clues? They’re not very subtle; I was alive and conscious on January 6, for example, and paid close attention, as most of us here did, to nearly every day of his presidency and behavior since. There are a few others that come to mind, one that touches on issues close to me and others here but I won’t kick that hornets nest in this conversation.
I think it largely comes down to two factors when you’re evaluating who and what someone is telling you.
The first is assessing what they are actually saying. This in part will come down to you knowing enough about the topic to identify false or misleading statements. You can also get some idea by if they are a recognized expert on the topic. Are they actually drawing on facts and evidence or just stating a “trutch” without any justification. And with the internet its often pretty easy to find out if someone is a recognized quack and why that is the case easily enough.
The second is how they say what they say. If they’re saying stuff like “you’re being lied to”, that there is some unnamed cabal that is suppressing the “truth”, if they are taking a contrarian position without any good evidential basis, etc. be skeptical. A big one is if they are trying to scare you.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Look at almost any of your posts on here. They are indicative of brainwashing.
Oh, the irony.
When B&Ps gives an opinion here, it is generally meticulously reasoned and explained. That is the opposite of brainwashed. Brainwashed people just repeat talking points.
Did you hear Biden pooped his pants?
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Look at almost any of your posts on here. They are indicative of brainwashing.
Oh, the irony.
When B&Ps gives an opinion here, it is generally meticulously reasoned and explained. That is the opposite of brainwashed. Brainwashed people just repeat talking points.
Did you hear Biden pooped his pants?
This reminds me of another red flag, is what they are telling you in some way subsumed by some sort of ideological view of the world.
If all the 24 hour TV news sites/channels disappeared overnight the country would be in a much better place. This goes mostly for the right leaning news channels who don’t seem to be based in factual reality but we’d also be much better off without the CNNs and MSNBCs too.
It’s a scourge on society.
There’s about a dozen of us guys in the neighborhood that have a WhatsApp group. A bunch of affluent white guys tends to skew conservative. I’d say it was probably 10-2 or 9-3 Trump to Biden voters in 2020. Only one of those guys I’d consider to be teetering into MAGA world. The others are people who think Trump is a piece of shit but would never vote for a democrat.
After Hunter got convicted the other day the semi-MAGA guy posted something along the lines of his dad will just pardon him. I replied his dad literally just said he won’t. Him: I don’t believe that. Me: posts two links to videos of President Biden saying those exact words. Him: I still don’t believe it. Me: You don’t believe the videos? Him: No. Me: I’m sure it’s buried on page 97 of Fox News but here’s Fox News reporting that. Believe it now? Him: Maybe. I’ll have to look more into it.
I don’t know how we deal with people like this.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Nearly 20 years ago (2005), we in the Lavender Room had some interesting discussions about evolution and the like. There was a guy who was a true YEC (Young Earth Creationist) believer, and argued vociferously for his position. Some time later, I received this message from him:
Hey Ken,
For some reason I felt compelled to send you this message. I don’t know what you’ll do with it.
I no longer hold the YEC view. It a scientific theory that is false many times over. I subscribed to the idea based on the assumption that those that do not interpret Genesis as being literal history and science are not REAL Christians. I think we both know where I got that idea from. I vigorously oppose that insinuation now.
I am now a very happy theistic evolutionist. While my recent view of God has not changed, my recent view of evolution has.** I have always known that evolution was supported by a large amount of evidence, but until I started digging back into it (reading Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology Textbook) I did not realize the exact magnitude of information back it.** It really is both fact and theory (as Gould and others describe it).
Anyway, this is the end of our debate on the subject, and I really wanted to apologize for any ill will or rubbed feelings from the argument/discussion. I certainly hold no bad feelings at all toward you, and respect and like you as a person.
I may make a thread about this sometime later in the Lavender room if I feel compelled, but I did want to make sure that I let you know and make certain that there was no animosity.
The highlighted bit says it all: one has to be willing to examine the evidence against one’s beliefs, to take the time to do the homework, accept when the facts contradict your world view, and adapt that world view to reality. Without that first, critical step, one continues to wallow in the disinformation.
(I sometimes use this as the “exception that proves the rule” that nobody changes their opinions based on Internet arguments. Ryan really was the exception)
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
I think that the more one learns, the more one realizes that we have ALL been fed tons and tons of total bullsh*t, literally from day one. So l am pretty sure that, unfortunately, none of our conclusions are really “solid”, by any reasonable definition of that word. Case in point is distant and also recent US history: it is nearly all demonstrably false. Just crack open any fully referenced book by Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky and it becomes obvious. Painfully so.
How does someone know if they have been fed a whole lot of bullshit and they are not weighing facts properly?
Do you believe there is a current disinformation campaign right now?
What are some clues?
How to you know you have solid conclusions?
Look at almost any of your posts on here. They are indicative of brainwashing.
Oh, the irony.
When B&Ps gives an opinion here, it is generally meticulously reasoned and explained. That is the opposite of brainwashed. Brainwashed people just repeat talking points.
Did you hear Biden pooped his pants?
B&P is the person who posted here that the LAPD had badges with deliberately racist coded badge numbers on them. The claim was debunked within about 3mins.
Everyone is influenced by misinformation, or at least by poor reporting, incomplete or inaccurate information, and spin. The infosphere is heavily influenced by marketing and “information warfare†techniques, even for things that you might expect to be straight news or raw data.
For some reason your post triggered a funny but interesting memory. My mother, who put us in Pentecostal church school, never talked about Santa or Easter Bunny or any of those cultural holiday icons. When it came up sometime in my 30s, she explained why:
She didn’t want to tell us things that were untrue because she didn’t want to lose our trust.
Again, this was coming from a woman who put us in fundamentalist young-earth special creation anti-evolution waiting-on-rapture cult-like Christian school.
It’s a blunt reminder of how people can think they’re acting on a principle while simultaneously ignoring it when beliefs trump reliable means of knowledge gathering, and the power of information bubbles.
Your TV is set on Fox News?
There are a few others that come to mind, one that touches on issues close to me and others here but I won’t kick that hornets nest in this conversation.
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q1141
I’ll let j p o take care of any hornets.
If you are asking the question, “Is this true” that is a good sign.
Have we seen this before? Conspiracies are generally hard to maintain so large conspiracies are generally unlikely. More likely there is a simpler explanation.
Like the satanic panic episode that gripped Canada and the US in the 80s and 90s. A few psychologists come up with a highly sketchy explanation for human misery. Some secret knowledge that the mainstream medical establishment isn’t aware of, unlikely.
Don’t uncritically accept “experts” Just because somebody works in a field does not make them an expert.
Something is more likely to be untrue if those advancing the information have little to gain from doing so.