There are many strawmen here. Does Putin even claim "Nazis run Ukraine"? Granted I have not followed this closely, but all I have heard is that "Ukraine has a Nazi problem". Same with bleach, not even Trump claimed that. poor post.
Utterly meaningless hairsplitting, and failed hairsplitting at that. Please re-read both my comment and Putin’s. He alleges that Nazis are the power behind the president, which is totally compatible with the claim that Nazis run Ukraine. It’s also completely compatible with myriad other statements by Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov, who recently had to invoke the theory that Hitler was part Jewish to explain how Ukraine’s Jewish president could be a Nazi.
You are attempting to use slight of hand to elide between "The"(definite article) and "A" (indefinite article).
Putin's statement is that there are Nazi influences on Ukraine, not that Nazism is the ruling philosophy of Ukraine. You are straw manning his position. If it was Putin's position that Nazis run Ukraine then why not make that statement ? Why run with the much weaker position that Ukraine is under Nazi influence and has Nazi elements ?
Nazi elements does not mean a totally Nazi government, you are wrong to suggest it does. The NASA moon program had powerful Nazi influences through Werner Von Braun, that hardly made it a Nazi project.
The Sergei Lavrov "Hitler ancestry" comments are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it's very hard to find a verbatim copy in the western press or any article that even quotes full sentences, I'm not even sure of the original language it was spoken in. That's not hard proof that it's being dishonestly manipulated but it does raise some red flags. The best versions I can find seem to have Lavrov arguing against the idea that Zelensky being Jewish denies the possibility of there being Nazi elements in Ukraine. That's a very reasonable position. In regards to the Hitler Jewish ancestry bit some reports of his interview include him saying "I may be wrong" other do not. I find that very interesting, don't you ?
What I have never seen or heard is either Putin or Lavrov saying "Zelensky is a Nazi"
Sorry, you didn’t actually address my point at all. “Under the influence of” is very different from “has influences.” Please feel free to try to obfuscate with a few more rambling paragraphs if you wish, though.
He's giving familiar examples of statements claimed to be "misinformation". He didn't attribute any of the statements to anyone. That's part of the point of the post - even the "statements of misinformaton" are often made up or viral.
I've heard people make all those claims execpt the one about bleach. (I've heard people say others make that claim, but that's proabably hyperbole.)
I'm not sure the people making claims about Lizardmen were serious tho. (Who knows? For a long time I thought Flat Earthers were trolls - but at least some of them really beleive it.)
I have heard that David Icke has claimed interstellar or possibly inter-dimensional Lizardmen rule the world through mind control and hybridization with humans. I heard a funny story about that. He was detained and interrogated by the intelligence services when trying to enter Israel. The security agents said something to the effect of; "Come on now Mr Icke, you SAY a conspiracy of interstellar Lizardmen rule the world but what you REALLY mean is Jews isn't it ! You're an anti-semite pushing the old protocols of the Elders of Zion line aren't you !
David Icke continued to talk with them at length about his particular interpretation of reality until he had thoroughly convinced them all that he really did mean interstellar Lizardmen, and they let him enter. Moral of the story is, anti-semite bad, nutcase fine.
> Still, the fundamental problem with the war on misinformation is that it scapegoats misinformation for the sins of irrationality. If human being were rational, misinformation would be basically harmless.
I have the sense that the meaning of key terms (especially "rational") are being misapplied here. Information is the data we process. Rationality is the processing. If we receive bad data, a rational thought process will still lead to bad conclusions.
You seem to be redefining "rationality" to mean "ignore data you think is bad", but that begs the question.
Yes, because that's only one piece of information among many.
Rational people are basically Bayesian, yes. People have a sea of first hand information about what goes on in their living rooms. So... seeing then elephant there is like, one against millions of data points.
On the other hand, people have little experience about what's going on around the world. Abstract thought gets us a long way, but it's still much weaker than lived experience. So a bad data point is going to be one against a smaller number of more uncertain data points. That is... the misinformation would have more influence on a rational person.
"Rational people are basically Bayesian... people have little experience about what's going on around the world.... the misinformation would have more influence on a rational person."
If rational people are Bayesian, and if they have little experience in some area, they should realize their limited experience and attach lower weight to the information (regardless of whether or not it's true) and not update their priors much. So, I don't think it follows that "misinformation would have more influence on a rational person."
There is something to be said for that. One of the problems with large governmental organizations, or very active government, is that people need to have a ton more information than they can handle if they want to meaningfully take part and make good decisions. The farther our decisions reach away from our personal lives the more likely they are to be woefully under informed.
Yes. I blame "missing child" milk cartons on 24x7 TV news.
In the past crime rates were much higher (ref: Stephen Pinker) but with rare exceptions people only heard about local crime. So they had a realistic sense of risk.
Global TV news cherry-picks the most emotinally distressing crime stories from the entire planet (teenager raped and killed on Carribean vacation)... and reminds us of them 24x7.
Our thinking evolved in the ancestral envirornment of tribes with a few hundred people (at most) - not a sample size of 7 billion people. So perceived risk is off the scale and totaly out of line with reality.
I wouldn't say we aren't *meant* to be influenced by data far outside our lived experience - just that our habitual information processing mechanisms aren't *optimized* for this sort of world. I'm fairly confident that our cultural processes have changed our individual information processing systems quite a bit for the world full of broadcast media and education systems and so on that we built over the past few centuries. But our cultural processes haven't necessarily caught up with the newer changes that arose with global peer-to-peer information spread on the internet.
You're right. Biden didn't steal the election. Zuckerberg and Soros stole the election, with a lot of help. When you imply that the statement "The election was stolen" is misinformation, and anyone who says that is a misinformed fool, you betray your political bias, at best, and you put yourself in the company of the misinformed fools you condemn, at worst.
Targeting the purveyors of “misinformation” is part of a broader pattern of blaming the supply side of any undesirable transactional social behavior. Drug use is blamed on suppliers. Consumerism is blamed on advertisers. Social media use on large tech companies. In all cases the consumers, the people, seem to be imagined as gullible, pliable sheep easily manipulated by nefarious others to act in ways that, in the absence of influence, they would not choose to act. As if the critic of the behavior cannot imagine someone voluntarily having a preference set different from their own.
If you accept the premise that people believe the strawmen Bryan used. The only one comes close to being acceptable is the election one. But again, there is a valid argument, most don't make it, but people know the election was irregular - at best.
Michigan verifies ballot using signatures, progressives in MI eliminated this fraud detection capability.
The progressive secretary of state issued a diktat for the 2020 election that all signatures must be presumed valid. That diktat was illegal.
and the secretary of state removed the means to gather evidence. There is no evidence to support a claim of no fraud, or a claim of fraud. Which would lead to following consistent conclusion, both the claims of "no election fraud" and "election fraud" are misinformation.
Isn't this just the same thing as the presumption of innocence in a court? This doesn't prevent people from being found guilty, it just requires significant evidence, and similarly for signature matching.
Yes and no. Both are trying to balance type 1 and 2 errors. In court, they err on setting guilty person free (type 2 error), while minimizing sending the an innocent person to jail (type 1 error). No one claims (other than defendant and his lawyer) that someone found not guilty is innocent. Type 1 error: rejecting a valid ballot, Type 2 error: accepting a fraudulent ballot. I have no doubt they minimized rejecting valid ballots. I have doubts they did not accept any fraudulent ballots, as they eliminated the means to screen the fraudulent ballots out. Claiming no fraud is like claiming innocence.
I don't think they *eliminated* the means to screen fraudulent ballots out - they just changed the process to change the ratio of error rates for the two types. It looks like they're still willing to reject absentee ballots on the basis of clear signature mismatches, but they have to prove a mismatch to reject it, rather than having to prove a match to accept it.
Our Greco-Roman culture has always tolerated–even encouraged–public dissemination of unsupported claims and even outright lies.
Alcibiades would be as successful in contemporary Western politics as he was in Athens, as was Caesar in Rome.
English scandal sheets in the 17th century, fanned the flames of falsehood on a mass scale and established a tradition of 'free speech' that afflicts us to this day.
That's not how Confucian cultures roll.
For as long as we've permitted public lying, they've insisted that those who speak publicly on important matters meet three criteria:
1. Have first-hand, practical experience in the matter being considered.
2. Be sincere and objective when speaking about it publicly.
3. Take full, personal responsibility for the consequences of their speech.
I have been studying PRC official speech since 1961 and comparing it to observable reality, and have yet to catch the Chinese government lying or making promises which they do not keep.
The Chinese–who have always held their officials in supremely high esteem–consider this unremarkable, while Westerners find it incredible.
Nevertheless, in multiple surveys by Western pollsters, for multiple decade, Chinese rank their governments, institutions and media the most trustworthy on earth.
I suppose it's true that people who haven't studied economics lean in favor of protectionism. But that doesn't mean they're wrong. People who have studied economic history, for example -- people with Ph.D's in this rigorous academic field -- also lean in favor of protectionism.
> If this seems implausible, remember the vast empirical literature on biased thinking. To take one of my favorite examples, people who have never studied economics are almost invariably protectionists. The reason can’t be “misinformation,” because people who have never studied economics spend near-zero time thinking about the subject. The story almost has to be, rather, that we’re predisposed to error. Protectionism is much more emotionally satisfying for psychologically normal humans. The study of economics is necessary to move away from this default.
This all makes sense to me, especially after reading "The Myth of the Rational Voter". But can you think of any reason why people would, by default, believe Ukraine to be at fault in the war? Here in Europe it does have to do with anti-Americanism, but what about people in US?
Great points! This is my take on the misinformation craze of late - it's a little orthogonal but feels related in spirit.
Imagine a world where social media, news outlets, etc, all had access to an information oracle that was able to perfectly flag, censor or otherwise edit content to the point of having almost nothing but objective truth or possibly valid opinions (and marked as such).
Now, imagine 20 years into the future, and some unscrupulous people come into power (far-fetched, I know), and has the ability to put information out that circumvents the misinformation filter. People would be so susceptible to suggestion - so ready to swallow whatever is fed them. A tyrant would have little resistance if they had the ability circumvent the oracle (or whatever).
Curating information isn't necessarily a good thing, even if you believe it's possible. There's something to be said for developing the psychological thick skin of skepticism the hard way. I think we do well to continually tune our skepticism (not too pollyanna, but not too cynical), through exercise. Apart from getting bad info from time to time, how else can we learn to think critically about things?
I think there's been a huge shift in the last 5 years in the willingness of politicians to spout absurd lies. Maybe people have always been willing to believe them and there was an elite hesitancy to use a highly effective but immoral rhetorical weapon. Maybe the masses have become more gullible. I think I lean more toward the former. I think people give tacit approval to their side's liars and attack the other side's liars and the people who care about truth aren't numerous to matter politically.
Assigning blame isn't really productive. Clearly listeners are culpable. If I say "Nazi Bigfoot faked the moon landing therefore vote for me", yes my lie is blameworthy, but anyone who believes it is too. But so what? People like that aren't going to be morally shamed, they're not going to listen to reason, they are untouchable by normal persuasion.
Best case "misinformation" is something that prevents obtainable equilibrium between stakeholders from forming. If so it can be corrected with more accurate information.
More likely though, people have irreconcilable differences in values and interests. Given this they will try to shape the public information space to their own advantage. There is a taboo, for good reasons, against nakedly expressing ones self interest or declaring ones value system objectively superior to another. So instead of saying "I will make you do X" you say "If you had accurate information, you would agree with X".
I admit that sometimes being more open about conflict rather then passive aggressive might be a better way of doing things.
I think it makes sense to think about the dynamics of information, like an ecology or an economy. There are some bits of information (accurate or inaccurate) that tend to pop up on their own, some that are easier or harder to spread, some that make others easier or harder to acquire (it's easier to acquire views about handwashing if you have related views about germ theory of disease; it's easier to acquire views about George Soros if you have related views about Jewish conspiracies), and so on. But not all of the dynamics are internal to the information - some are dependent on social structure, and on communications technology.
Just as the global aviation system makes the dynamics of viral spread very different, so that pandemics are now a phenomenon that arise in a year or two, rather than taking decades (or centuries, like Black Death), the social media system makes the dynamics of informational spread very different. It's going to change the equilibrium behavior of the system, with certain types of information (accurate or inaccurate) becoming much easier or harder to spread to fixation than they used to be.
I agree that a lot of mainstream discussion of "misinformation" misses all these important points, but dismissive claims about how misinformation has always existed also miss the points. There really is something qualitatively different about the global information ecosystem now that we live in a world of social media rather than broadcast media (which was itself a very different information ecosystem from the largely illiterate world before the printing press), and it behooves us to get a better understanding of this, just as we need to have a better understanding of the global virus ecosystem in a world connected with air travel.
“Nazis run Ukraine.” “Biden stole the election.” “You can cure Covid by injecting bleach.”
This is pretty harmless misinformation. What about the serious one?
* Human capital increase thru spending in (public) education. Let’s increase that spending!
* Border protection is key to the US survival.
* Majority should rule. Voter's rationality will make politicians effective and accountable
* God love us (even Ukrainians) and sent us his/her beloved son as an irrefutable proof and to save us from evil (and this happened more than 2,000 years ago)
* I will love you forever. Till death set us apart.
* Yes, Daddy, I will take good care of you until you are old.
It seems to me that "misinformation" is like air to human beings. Our irrationality needs it to survive. That’s who we are. We are made out of "convenient missinformation"). We just die in its absent.
Being human and trying to survive on an exclusive diet of truths seems a little "Nietzscheske" to me.
Even more than ego or "status", I think such things always boil down to classic mercantilism (which is usually talked about with respect to the international economic stance, but more generally is also the approach to domestic economic policy where the government creates and protects market power for firms).
1. Baby formula: Classic regulatory capture. Even when the proximate cause of the shortage seems like potential contamination at a regulated factory, the "misinformation" the government is most concerned with is the potential that people would make their own baby formula or illegally import foreign formula which isn't labeled to American FDA standards. That is, the official concern is almost entirely going toward protecting the (artificially) controlled market over which the FDA presides.
2. COVID treatments: Again, classic regulatory capture. Unapproved, outsider treatments are preemptively rejected, while treatments promoted by established members of the guild are protected even when proven ineffective.
3. Ukraine: the concentrated interests of various profit seeking groups with close ties to the state (most obviously the defense industry) all favor a certain interpretation of how "Nazi" Ukraine is.
4. 2020 election: I'm not going there, but, again, the accepted interpretation is always the official interpretation, and it's the one that a lot of people have careers and money riding on.
There are many strawmen here. Does Putin even claim "Nazis run Ukraine"? Granted I have not followed this closely, but all I have heard is that "Ukraine has a Nazi problem". Same with bleach, not even Trump claimed that. poor post.
So are you saying Caplan had misinformation about misinformation about misinformation?
Yes, of course Putin claims that. Here is Russian state media reporting on Putin's allegations that Nazis run Ukraine: https://www.rt.com/russia/544248-zelensky-nazi-influence-putin/
You're hallucinating. The article simply doesn't say that Nazis run Ukraine. Read it again.
"its leader fell prey to “Nazi” influences, Russian President Vladimir Putin has alleged."
and,
"he, like his predecessors, fell under the influence of radical elements – as they say in Ukraine, Nazis.”
The common sense interpretation of these statements is very clear. Not a Nazi president or government but influenced by Nazis.
Utterly meaningless hairsplitting, and failed hairsplitting at that. Please re-read both my comment and Putin’s. He alleges that Nazis are the power behind the president, which is totally compatible with the claim that Nazis run Ukraine. It’s also completely compatible with myriad other statements by Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov, who recently had to invoke the theory that Hitler was part Jewish to explain how Ukraine’s Jewish president could be a Nazi.
You are attempting to use slight of hand to elide between "The"(definite article) and "A" (indefinite article).
Putin's statement is that there are Nazi influences on Ukraine, not that Nazism is the ruling philosophy of Ukraine. You are straw manning his position. If it was Putin's position that Nazis run Ukraine then why not make that statement ? Why run with the much weaker position that Ukraine is under Nazi influence and has Nazi elements ?
Nazi elements does not mean a totally Nazi government, you are wrong to suggest it does. The NASA moon program had powerful Nazi influences through Werner Von Braun, that hardly made it a Nazi project.
The Sergei Lavrov "Hitler ancestry" comments are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it's very hard to find a verbatim copy in the western press or any article that even quotes full sentences, I'm not even sure of the original language it was spoken in. That's not hard proof that it's being dishonestly manipulated but it does raise some red flags. The best versions I can find seem to have Lavrov arguing against the idea that Zelensky being Jewish denies the possibility of there being Nazi elements in Ukraine. That's a very reasonable position. In regards to the Hitler Jewish ancestry bit some reports of his interview include him saying "I may be wrong" other do not. I find that very interesting, don't you ?
What I have never seen or heard is either Putin or Lavrov saying "Zelensky is a Nazi"
Have you ?
Sorry, you didn’t actually address my point at all. “Under the influence of” is very different from “has influences.” Please feel free to try to obfuscate with a few more rambling paragraphs if you wish, though.
He's giving familiar examples of statements claimed to be "misinformation". He didn't attribute any of the statements to anyone. That's part of the point of the post - even the "statements of misinformaton" are often made up or viral.
Are they examples? I don't think anyone makes the claims, nevermind believes the claims.
I've heard people make all those claims execpt the one about bleach. (I've heard people say others make that claim, but that's proabably hyperbole.)
I'm not sure the people making claims about Lizardmen were serious tho. (Who knows? For a long time I thought Flat Earthers were trolls - but at least some of them really beleive it.)
I have heard that David Icke has claimed interstellar or possibly inter-dimensional Lizardmen rule the world through mind control and hybridization with humans. I heard a funny story about that. He was detained and interrogated by the intelligence services when trying to enter Israel. The security agents said something to the effect of; "Come on now Mr Icke, you SAY a conspiracy of interstellar Lizardmen rule the world but what you REALLY mean is Jews isn't it ! You're an anti-semite pushing the old protocols of the Elders of Zion line aren't you !
David Icke continued to talk with them at length about his particular interpretation of reality until he had thoroughly convinced them all that he really did mean interstellar Lizardmen, and they let him enter. Moral of the story is, anti-semite bad, nutcase fine.
> Still, the fundamental problem with the war on misinformation is that it scapegoats misinformation for the sins of irrationality. If human being were rational, misinformation would be basically harmless.
I have the sense that the meaning of key terms (especially "rational") are being misapplied here. Information is the data we process. Rationality is the processing. If we receive bad data, a rational thought process will still lead to bad conclusions.
You seem to be redefining "rationality" to mean "ignore data you think is bad", but that begs the question.
Yes, because that's only one piece of information among many.
Rational people are basically Bayesian, yes. People have a sea of first hand information about what goes on in their living rooms. So... seeing then elephant there is like, one against millions of data points.
On the other hand, people have little experience about what's going on around the world. Abstract thought gets us a long way, but it's still much weaker than lived experience. So a bad data point is going to be one against a smaller number of more uncertain data points. That is... the misinformation would have more influence on a rational person.
"Rational people are basically Bayesian... people have little experience about what's going on around the world.... the misinformation would have more influence on a rational person."
If rational people are Bayesian, and if they have little experience in some area, they should realize their limited experience and attach lower weight to the information (regardless of whether or not it's true) and not update their priors much. So, I don't think it follows that "misinformation would have more influence on a rational person."
There is something to be said for that. One of the problems with large governmental organizations, or very active government, is that people need to have a ton more information than they can handle if they want to meaningfully take part and make good decisions. The farther our decisions reach away from our personal lives the more likely they are to be woefully under informed.
Decentralize decision making as much as possible.
Yes. I blame "missing child" milk cartons on 24x7 TV news.
In the past crime rates were much higher (ref: Stephen Pinker) but with rare exceptions people only heard about local crime. So they had a realistic sense of risk.
Global TV news cherry-picks the most emotinally distressing crime stories from the entire planet (teenager raped and killed on Carribean vacation)... and reminds us of them 24x7.
Our thinking evolved in the ancestral envirornment of tribes with a few hundred people (at most) - not a sample size of 7 billion people. So perceived risk is off the scale and totaly out of line with reality.
I wouldn't say we aren't *meant* to be influenced by data far outside our lived experience - just that our habitual information processing mechanisms aren't *optimized* for this sort of world. I'm fairly confident that our cultural processes have changed our individual information processing systems quite a bit for the world full of broadcast media and education systems and so on that we built over the past few centuries. But our cultural processes haven't necessarily caught up with the newer changes that arose with global peer-to-peer information spread on the internet.
You're right. Biden didn't steal the election. Zuckerberg and Soros stole the election, with a lot of help. When you imply that the statement "The election was stolen" is misinformation, and anyone who says that is a misinformed fool, you betray your political bias, at best, and you put yourself in the company of the misinformed fools you condemn, at worst.
Targeting the purveyors of “misinformation” is part of a broader pattern of blaming the supply side of any undesirable transactional social behavior. Drug use is blamed on suppliers. Consumerism is blamed on advertisers. Social media use on large tech companies. In all cases the consumers, the people, seem to be imagined as gullible, pliable sheep easily manipulated by nefarious others to act in ways that, in the absence of influence, they would not choose to act. As if the critic of the behavior cannot imagine someone voluntarily having a preference set different from their own.
In other words, a lot of people are stupid.
If you accept the premise that people believe the strawmen Bryan used. The only one comes close to being acceptable is the election one. But again, there is a valid argument, most don't make it, but people know the election was irregular - at best.
Michigan verifies ballot using signatures, progressives in MI eliminated this fraud detection capability.
The progressive secretary of state issued a diktat for the 2020 election that all signatures must be presumed valid. That diktat was illegal.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/15/judge-rules-secretary-state-bensons-ballot-signature-verification-guidance-invalid/4699927001/
If you presume signatures to be valid, and verify ballots by signature, can you find ballot fraud?
No, there was no way they could find fraud. The claim of no fraud is not supported - full stop.
Michigan eliminated type 1 errors with this diktat, they no doubt committed type 2 errors. It would be foolish misinformation to argue otherwise.
Every election has fraud. That's a given.
The question is "how much" - enough to change the result?
For that we need evidence.
and the secretary of state removed the means to gather evidence. There is no evidence to support a claim of no fraud, or a claim of fraud. Which would lead to following consistent conclusion, both the claims of "no election fraud" and "election fraud" are misinformation.
Isn't this just the same thing as the presumption of innocence in a court? This doesn't prevent people from being found guilty, it just requires significant evidence, and similarly for signature matching.
Yes and no. Both are trying to balance type 1 and 2 errors. In court, they err on setting guilty person free (type 2 error), while minimizing sending the an innocent person to jail (type 1 error). No one claims (other than defendant and his lawyer) that someone found not guilty is innocent. Type 1 error: rejecting a valid ballot, Type 2 error: accepting a fraudulent ballot. I have no doubt they minimized rejecting valid ballots. I have doubts they did not accept any fraudulent ballots, as they eliminated the means to screen the fraudulent ballots out. Claiming no fraud is like claiming innocence.
I don't think they *eliminated* the means to screen fraudulent ballots out - they just changed the process to change the ratio of error rates for the two types. It looks like they're still willing to reject absentee ballots on the basis of clear signature mismatches, but they have to prove a mismatch to reject it, rather than having to prove a match to accept it.
they eliminated it.
That wasn't stated in the article you shared.
Our Greco-Roman culture has always tolerated–even encouraged–public dissemination of unsupported claims and even outright lies.
Alcibiades would be as successful in contemporary Western politics as he was in Athens, as was Caesar in Rome.
English scandal sheets in the 17th century, fanned the flames of falsehood on a mass scale and established a tradition of 'free speech' that afflicts us to this day.
That's not how Confucian cultures roll.
For as long as we've permitted public lying, they've insisted that those who speak publicly on important matters meet three criteria:
1. Have first-hand, practical experience in the matter being considered.
2. Be sincere and objective when speaking about it publicly.
3. Take full, personal responsibility for the consequences of their speech.
I have been studying PRC official speech since 1961 and comparing it to observable reality, and have yet to catch the Chinese government lying or making promises which they do not keep.
The Chinese–who have always held their officials in supremely high esteem–consider this unremarkable, while Westerners find it incredible.
Nevertheless, in multiple surveys by Western pollsters, for multiple decade, Chinese rank their governments, institutions and media the most trustworthy on earth.
I suppose it's true that people who haven't studied economics lean in favor of protectionism. But that doesn't mean they're wrong. People who have studied economic history, for example -- people with Ph.D's in this rigorous academic field -- also lean in favor of protectionism.
> If this seems implausible, remember the vast empirical literature on biased thinking. To take one of my favorite examples, people who have never studied economics are almost invariably protectionists. The reason can’t be “misinformation,” because people who have never studied economics spend near-zero time thinking about the subject. The story almost has to be, rather, that we’re predisposed to error. Protectionism is much more emotionally satisfying for psychologically normal humans. The study of economics is necessary to move away from this default.
This all makes sense to me, especially after reading "The Myth of the Rational Voter". But can you think of any reason why people would, by default, believe Ukraine to be at fault in the war? Here in Europe it does have to do with anti-Americanism, but what about people in US?
Great points! This is my take on the misinformation craze of late - it's a little orthogonal but feels related in spirit.
Imagine a world where social media, news outlets, etc, all had access to an information oracle that was able to perfectly flag, censor or otherwise edit content to the point of having almost nothing but objective truth or possibly valid opinions (and marked as such).
Now, imagine 20 years into the future, and some unscrupulous people come into power (far-fetched, I know), and has the ability to put information out that circumvents the misinformation filter. People would be so susceptible to suggestion - so ready to swallow whatever is fed them. A tyrant would have little resistance if they had the ability circumvent the oracle (or whatever).
Curating information isn't necessarily a good thing, even if you believe it's possible. There's something to be said for developing the psychological thick skin of skepticism the hard way. I think we do well to continually tune our skepticism (not too pollyanna, but not too cynical), through exercise. Apart from getting bad info from time to time, how else can we learn to think critically about things?
I think there's been a huge shift in the last 5 years in the willingness of politicians to spout absurd lies. Maybe people have always been willing to believe them and there was an elite hesitancy to use a highly effective but immoral rhetorical weapon. Maybe the masses have become more gullible. I think I lean more toward the former. I think people give tacit approval to their side's liars and attack the other side's liars and the people who care about truth aren't numerous to matter politically.
Assigning blame isn't really productive. Clearly listeners are culpable. If I say "Nazi Bigfoot faked the moon landing therefore vote for me", yes my lie is blameworthy, but anyone who believes it is too. But so what? People like that aren't going to be morally shamed, they're not going to listen to reason, they are untouchable by normal persuasion.
Best case "misinformation" is something that prevents obtainable equilibrium between stakeholders from forming. If so it can be corrected with more accurate information.
More likely though, people have irreconcilable differences in values and interests. Given this they will try to shape the public information space to their own advantage. There is a taboo, for good reasons, against nakedly expressing ones self interest or declaring ones value system objectively superior to another. So instead of saying "I will make you do X" you say "If you had accurate information, you would agree with X".
I admit that sometimes being more open about conflict rather then passive aggressive might be a better way of doing things.
I think it makes sense to think about the dynamics of information, like an ecology or an economy. There are some bits of information (accurate or inaccurate) that tend to pop up on their own, some that are easier or harder to spread, some that make others easier or harder to acquire (it's easier to acquire views about handwashing if you have related views about germ theory of disease; it's easier to acquire views about George Soros if you have related views about Jewish conspiracies), and so on. But not all of the dynamics are internal to the information - some are dependent on social structure, and on communications technology.
Just as the global aviation system makes the dynamics of viral spread very different, so that pandemics are now a phenomenon that arise in a year or two, rather than taking decades (or centuries, like Black Death), the social media system makes the dynamics of informational spread very different. It's going to change the equilibrium behavior of the system, with certain types of information (accurate or inaccurate) becoming much easier or harder to spread to fixation than they used to be.
I agree that a lot of mainstream discussion of "misinformation" misses all these important points, but dismissive claims about how misinformation has always existed also miss the points. There really is something qualitatively different about the global information ecosystem now that we live in a world of social media rather than broadcast media (which was itself a very different information ecosystem from the largely illiterate world before the printing press), and it behooves us to get a better understanding of this, just as we need to have a better understanding of the global virus ecosystem in a world connected with air travel.
“Nazis run Ukraine.” “Biden stole the election.” “You can cure Covid by injecting bleach.”
This is pretty harmless misinformation. What about the serious one?
* Human capital increase thru spending in (public) education. Let’s increase that spending!
* Border protection is key to the US survival.
* Majority should rule. Voter's rationality will make politicians effective and accountable
* God love us (even Ukrainians) and sent us his/her beloved son as an irrefutable proof and to save us from evil (and this happened more than 2,000 years ago)
* I will love you forever. Till death set us apart.
* Yes, Daddy, I will take good care of you until you are old.
It seems to me that "misinformation" is like air to human beings. Our irrationality needs it to survive. That’s who we are. We are made out of "convenient missinformation"). We just die in its absent.
Being human and trying to survive on an exclusive diet of truths seems a little "Nietzscheske" to me.
it's demand, not supply
Even more than ego or "status", I think such things always boil down to classic mercantilism (which is usually talked about with respect to the international economic stance, but more generally is also the approach to domestic economic policy where the government creates and protects market power for firms).
1. Baby formula: Classic regulatory capture. Even when the proximate cause of the shortage seems like potential contamination at a regulated factory, the "misinformation" the government is most concerned with is the potential that people would make their own baby formula or illegally import foreign formula which isn't labeled to American FDA standards. That is, the official concern is almost entirely going toward protecting the (artificially) controlled market over which the FDA presides.
2. COVID treatments: Again, classic regulatory capture. Unapproved, outsider treatments are preemptively rejected, while treatments promoted by established members of the guild are protected even when proven ineffective.
3. Ukraine: the concentrated interests of various profit seeking groups with close ties to the state (most obviously the defense industry) all favor a certain interpretation of how "Nazi" Ukraine is.
4. 2020 election: I'm not going there, but, again, the accepted interpretation is always the official interpretation, and it's the one that a lot of people have careers and money riding on.