I've got a friend who, over the years, has consistently forwarded e-mails to me: many were funny and a majority were politically biased toward the conservative end of the spectrum. Last election his forwarding of articles that were factually incorrect increased severely to the point that I would read the subject and a few sentences and then discard them.
I was surprised that he didn't check out his sources or information before forwarding information: snopes.com and other sites are so readily available and easy to use. I even suggested casually one day how he could check internet rumors with snopes, and he listened, but only muted his forwarding awhile.
So I set up a rule routing his e-mail to a separate folder that I check occasionally. I keep the good jokes and flush the fake news. Nonetheless I find it useful for keeping a finger on him and others who are seriously misled or subject to rumors. That way, I know something of what they think and I can still talk to them w/o being shocked.
I don't want to refuse someone as a person b/c they're not particularly bright or b/c they are unable to navigate the internet sufficiently to check what is true/false. This way I know a little of what they're thinking on current events and can approach them w/o offending them. And I get to hear the good jokes, which I cannot resist!
There's a section that was recently added to Google News called "Fact Check" that includes links to Politifact, Snopes, and fact checking at various newspapers. It is a good idea, to provide refutations of false stories that are going around, but it is also enormously depressing. Very rarely are any of the stories the sort of thing that should have got any traction at all, since they're just idiotic, and I have never seen anyone change their approach to evaluating the news after being called out on spreading such false stories on social media. The kind of people inclined to believe that stuff just don't care, for the most part.
> thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working.
Which is true. How did they conclude that he is suggesting "don't love their health care system". You can love NHS and still march because its going broke, marching doesn't imply "don't love".
In order to reflect the subtleties Politifact use a sliding scale instead of purely true/false, and the article you linked is over 20 paragraphs in length.
I couldn't find Google's "Fact Check" but did find an article indicating that Google has apparently removed it, stating:
"We said previously that we encountered challenges in our systems that maps fact checks to publishers, and on further examination it’s clear that we are unable to deliver the quality we’d like for users....Fact checks from independent organizations will still appear alongside articles in search and Google News. "
FactCheck.org said something very similar to that.
> Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them. The FBI said Clinton’s tech team used BleachBit, which is a free software program. It does not use chemicals.
- usually Snopes has an almost-identical article about each e-mail subject that my friend sends me. So he would, if he checked, see his own e-mail subject and content highlighted with a big banner that said "FALSE" and explained why/how/etc.
This is not terribly surprising, but it’s nice to see some experimental confirmation.
Here’s my question: Many will use this data to make themselves feel better (“See, I told you they were all idiots.”) How can this data be used to actually help the problem? Are there techniques that can be applied to help folks who lack high cognitive abilities to see and understand that they’re being manipulated?
> Are there techniques that can be applied to help folks who lack high cognitive abilities to see and understand that they’re being manipulated?
Or to help ourselves see that? I think it would be a mistake if everyone who read this assumed it was simply a problem with the other side (“See, I told you they were all idiots”). Nate Silver has made a good case that the media's focus on the Comey letter non-story was one of the main factors for Clinton's loss, and it's hard to not see a connection between their refusal to look at their own reporting and their sudden focus on "fake news." Just this week I ran into an NPR fact checker claiming "It’s true that an immigrant can sponsor extended family members for visas"[1] (in context, talking about immigration visas), when that seems to not be the case at all[2].
It's true that shoddy journalism is different from intentional manipulation, but the line between the two is often blurred. You also have the same issue with both - even when people are presented by the facts, they won't reconsider their positions. I've run into this issue in the past - when you present the original source and show how it contradicts a news report, it's not uncommon to get the reply "that can't be true, or else the media would have said so."
The same Nate Silver and 538 who were hilariously wrong about Trump the whole time? His team didn't seem to have any clue what drove people to support Trump. Giving Clinton 95% win percent even at point where anyone actually following the race could see it was going to be neck and neck at best.
Or as Nate declared there is no path to 270 for Trump. Not quite sure how he declared that as predicting Trump when Nate and 538 predictions were the butt of jokes among Trump supporters.
I'd be cautious about their predictions and would point out anyone that they might be vulnerable to fake news.
>Just this week I ran into an NPR fact checker claiming "It’s true that an immigrant can sponsor extended family members for visas"[1] (in context, talking about immigration visas), when that seems to not be the case at all[2].
How do you figure? The USCIS page talks about the program mentioned by NPR, where a limited number of visas are available for extended family of US citizens.
The problem here is that “immediate” and “extended” family in US immigration do not mean that same thing as those terms mean in any other context, and both are what would be considered immediate family of the sponsoring citizen or permanent resident in other contexts (parents, spouse/fiance, children, and siblings, and nothing further.)
“immediate family” in US immigration refers to a spouse or fiance of a US citizen, certain minor children of US citizens, and parents of adult US citizens.
“extended family” refers to children (including adult children) of US citizens not considered “immediate family”, adult siblings of US citizens, and spouses and children (including adult children) of permanent residents.
This creates and immense opportunity for lying by way of equivocation, where a statement which is accurate only because the definition of a key term in the context of the statement is different than what the audience understands it to be is used to convey a message which depends on the audience interpreting the statement according to a different definition of that term.
It creates an opportunity for lying by way of equivocation, but it is also just an unavoidable part of language and communication. The statement NPR made doesn't drastically change if "extended family" contains cousins or not, and they link to more information right next to the statement. It's hard for me to see malice in the action.
> The statement NPR made doesn't drastically change if "extended family"
I disagree. They're fact checking this statement that Trump made:
> Under the current, broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.
In response they write:
> It’s true that an immigrant can sponsor extended family members for visas — but only after he or she becomes a U.S. citizen.
The vast majority of people reading the statement and response to it would be unaware that the only "extended family" they can sponsor are their siblings. If anything, it seems to confirm the false statement that "a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives," simply adding some caveats about the process being difficult and taking years.
Stopping the NPR response at that point is far more misleading than their use of "extended family." If there's a strict cap on the number of visas on offer, bringing in 100 siblings is basically the same as 100 siblings or cousins.
> The statement NPR made doesn't drastically change if "extended family" contains cousins or not,
Not only does it change, but the specific NPR statement is false in both the technical and general senses; but I was responding to the general back and forth on HN about “extended family”, not the specific issued with the NPR claim.
> A U.S. citizen can file a petition for the following relatives:
• Husband or wife;
• Children, married or unmarried
A U.S. citizen who is at least 21 years or older may also petition for the following relatives:
• Parents;
• Brothers or sisters.
From my understanding (and from everything I can find on the USCIS site and all other immigration sites), a U.S. citizen can sponsor immediate family members. They can not sponsor extended family members (cousins, uncles, in-laws, etc.).
The USCIS refers to "immediate family" as parents, spouses and children, as seen on your first link, so "extended family" would involve siblings. One of those situations where a term can have a legal meaning that's different from how it is commonly used. The NPR part also links to another article that explains who can be sponsored right away.
good explanation but I can't help but wonder, wouldn't your immediate family's immediate family by extension also be your immediate family? at least within the same generations that your immediate family cover (aka your siblings are the immediate family of your parents and they are the same generation as you so wouldn't it make logical sense to refer to them as immediate?)
not trying to cast shade on any arguments made already or anything im just legitimately curious about it from a logical perspective
I'm reading Annie Duke's brand new (and excellent!) book called "Thinking in Bets". She suggests that placing monetary bets is a good way to force yourself (and possibly others) to reason about how they know what they know, consider what the other person knows that they don't, etc.
In prospect theory, I think this is akin to triggering the Type II system (the "slow" thinking).
> This is not terribly surprising, but it’s nice to see some experimental confirmation.
Not really being serious here, but this made me chuckle a bit, on an article about fake news, etc. The sentence above literally reads like confirmation bias happening in real time, the way you phrased it.
I'm not saying you are guilty of it here, the phrasing just jumped out at me - and is a good example of the kind of thought, that when we have it, ought to trigger our inner skeptic :P
In my opinion, fake news isn’t nearly as prevalent or as dangerous as news that mostly tells the truth as a technicality or formality, but is presenting a radically skewed and biased narrative.
That kind of dishonesty fools even people on the upper end of cognitive ability.
Modern news cycles are edited together like reality TV shows. The bias is for sensationalism, and for supporting and validating the worldview of the journalists and financial backers involved.
The media’s gestalt can be a massive deliberate lie and con on the entire population, and they can easily achieve that without ever telling a single individual lie.
Which isn’t to say they don’t sometimes resort to flat-out lying, there’s a good amount of that too. But mostly what the “credible” news sources do is take a large selection of truths, and sum them up to a whole that’s deliberately engineered to deceive everybody for the sake of sensational, political and social bias.
I think recent events (thanks in no small part to susceptibility to "fake news") have shown that the "radically skewed and biased narrative" of what many call the Washington consensus is far preferable to letting the Breitbarts of the world get away with their actual lies.
Just because a narrative is biased and skewed doesn't disqualify it from being better than other narratives.
Who's silencing anything? I was responding to this thesis:
> fake news isn’t nearly as prevalent or as dangerous as news that mostly tells the truth as a technicality or formality
Which is demonstrably false, as we can see by the prevalence of large-scale acceptance of outright false propaganda and its aftermath. Breitbart-style lies are far more dangerous than WSJ-style story selection. You can counter people believing true but incomplete stories with other true (but probably incomplete) stories. You can't counter people just accepting demonstrable lies, since clearly the truth does not matter to them in the first place.
> Just because a narrative is biased and skewed doesn't disqualify it from being better than other narratives.
It makes it far worse. Very few people take Breitbart seriously but many will take CNN or NYT seriously. The mainstream media is far too powerful to ignore when they push a narrative. Smaller outfits on the far left/right don't pose the same existential threat to our society.
The consumption habits of people proof this statement wrong. Tabloid newspapers have higher circulation than anything else. In some countries a majority of people receive their news from facebook or other social media feeds. Television channels like fox news draw more viewers than cspan.
The mainstream media is not that mainstream at all. The principle of 'the big lie' still works very well.
When your audience is affluent and powerful, you don't need as many to have an oversized impact. It's not like NYT has a small readership. They are massive and their influence is far greater than that of The Enquirer.
In a democracy the affluent and powerful have as many votes as anybody else. If the NYT only manages to reach a upper class clientele who already agree with the NYT they are not very powerful at all. (as we have seen during the last election, if the NYT et al were that powerful we would have seen a different outcome)
Tabloids and fake news rags on the other hand have been reaching far into the middle class, the non-voters and so forth, in other words they're generating an audience among people who we would have considered to be immune to demagoguery.
Affluent and powerful people are typically people that are smart enough to parse out any mild bias and ignore it. The Gomer and Cletus crowds of the world that vote are the people that are the risk for the lies of the fake news sources because they vote and are a very large group.
>Very few people take Breitbart seriously but many will take CNN or NYT seriously.
Many people take Breitbart seriously and do not take CNN seriously. Alexa ranks it at 52 for US traffic. Many people take CNN seriously and do not take Breitbart seriously. Its site is ranked 25.
> Asked to rate a fictitious person on a range of character traits, people who scored low on a test of cognitive ability continued to be influenced by damaging information about the person even after they were explicitly told the information was false.
I think this makes more sense if you consider instincts around forming alliances, rather than raw cognitive ability. In the real world, a successful belief adoption strategy is not merely one that leads you to correct beliefs, but one that leads you to successful beliefs. In many cases, correct beliefs are the most successful. But social implications can easily override that.
For example, it seems obviously incorrect to believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, since it tells of his own death. But belief in non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was not a successful one in 16th century Europe, since it was considered heretical.
In this case, hearing negative information about someone provides evidence for at least four things:
1. The negative information is true
2. Other people believe the negative information is true
3. That person's social standing is insufficient to prevent this negative information from spreading
3. Assuming the information is false, someone else has reason to spread it
Only the first one of those relates to the objective truth of the information, or has much bearing on the person's character. The rest have much more to do with social consequences of allying yourself with the person in question.
Of course, people don't usually evaluate all of those factors consciously and then think "Well this person is probably good, but they're also a potential pariah who I should avoid associating with". Instead, we have instincts that lead us to better social strategies by shaping our beliefs.
That's obviously not the whole story, since these researchers did find that cognitive ability correlated with attitude adjustment. But I think the social side of this is a crucial piece, and may interact with cognitive ability in ways which might be difficult to control for. For example, it seems plausible that a person with intellectual social status would be more willing to adopt contrarian views, which would make it easier for them to give less weight to the social implications, and more weight to the objective question.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. From my experience in life, pursuing the truth relentlessly leads to one becoming a social pariah. It's why I've always had a very difficult time labeling myself or my beliefs, because none of them fit into a bucket.
I think a great example of your point is the politics surrounding guns. It's one of the few things I've seen highly educated, left-leaning folks spread/believe fake news about.
My favorite fake news topic about guns is the classic "silencer" debate. So many prominent democrats have railed against "silencers" and how they can make mass shootings more deadly. It's absolute bologna, but it is believed and spread as truth none the less.
Most people don't know that just firing a gun once without ear protection will cause permanent hearing loss. A suppressor will reduce the decibels to the point of it being still incredibly loud, but not as damaging to the ears. It's definitely not "silent"
Generally, it's a case of media trying to conflate flash suppressors (sparing the vision of the shooter) with noise suppressors (with the implied intent of providing cover for homicide). I think a lot of that is inspired by bad 1970s TV and film depictions of screw-on "silencers" (including on revolvers).
“We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity.”
Been thinking about this a lot lately. The fantasy the modern society had somehow left the jungle has been crumbling for me as it's been becoming more and more clear that the unskilled/disadvantaged are truly fucked and becoming more so.
I don't like it, but it really is a fucking jungle out there. Nature can be cruel and spreading fake news for personal gain is as viable a survival strategy as any other form of parasitism.
Will continue to hold onto naive notions that human existence can have some sort of meaning beyond survival of the best adapted until the sun burns out, however, but it ain't easy. We weren't meant to live like this, dammit!
I think that article addresses a different issue. Obviously we should not treat people with fewer cognitive abilities with contempt or cast them out of our society.
But if you believe that there are such things as truths and falsehoods and that they can positively and negatively shape our society, we cannot ignore the effect that 'fake news' or other misinformation have on large parts of the population.
We can't drop the pursuit of truth just for the sake of satisfying an angry majority. That's going to turn society into a clown-car.
The old word of "fake news" is propaganda. The western media is also full with it, usually because they are sponsored by big companies or are linked with political parties. Both sides use propaganda, and it is hard to trust the news today with anything. Currently everyone uses fake news to mark some information that they don't like.
The article starts with a wrong position. "Fake news" was not invented by Trump, but it was introduced during the election by "PropOrNot". The website, which is probably propaganda by itself, stated that many independent media were Russian propaganda. This unfounded claim was used to help the democratic candidate, after wikileaks published material about pay-to-play and media-bias.
Afterwards the russian propaganda idea was fake news, because there has been no evidence that the election has been strongly manipulated by Russian bots or operatives. Instead researchers find people who have strong opinions and have lots of time to post stuff.
The article has a good point: "If you are convinced that some claim is true, ask yourself why. Is it because you have credible evidence that the claim is true, or is it just because you’ve encountered the claim over and over?"
In this I see the media repeating the "Russian hacked the election" thing, for which there is no real evidence. The reports from all agencies only based this idea on rumours. The wikileak documents themselves seem to be downloaded on a USB drive, and not via the internetz.
But can we withstand this "fake news", when there is so much support for it? And why is no-one talking about the pay-to-play problem. It is likely a problem of the political system, not just a candidate.
I agree with the solution against fake news. We should have credible evidence. But these should not be "public service announcements". These are usually linked to sponsors or political parties. Most people already disagree on what sources can be trusted. For example I trust wikileaks a lot more than many other people. They stand for freedom of information, unlike their opposition who likes to destroy relevant information (like torture records or emails).
And freedom of information is exactly what is needed for this whole problem. No information should be hidden in a democracy. And that is how we really should solve the fake news /propaganda problem: All relevant information should be available.
Just like every experiment should be repeatable in science.
No, they are different by a matter of degree. Propaganda is all about spin, context, and stretching the truth. Stuff that actually happened but is presented in a mis-represented and misleading fashion. Fake news is completely fabricated and entirely fictional.
I think that is an overly charitable view of the scope and variety of propaganda. The term "propaganda" is broad enough to include 100% accurate but carefully selected information, information based on facts but presented with spin or misleading framing, and 100% fictional information.
In my mind, unifying idea of "propaganda" is that it is designed to mislead and cause the consumer to draw conclusions different than what might otherwise be reached via an accurate and truthful understanding of the issue. There is a notion of "intent" in propaganda that is absent or explained more by ignorance and naiveté in "fake news".
The idea of "fake news" certainly overlaps with propaganda, but it also includes genuinely sloppy reporting and inaccuracy introduced by ignorance of the subject matter and a willingness to repeat and mimic true propaganda. The sloppiness and inaccuracy often occurs due to confirmation bias in the reporting process.
lots of propaganda is completely faked, especially in controlled populations when you don't have to worry about following real events, you can just make them up to get the reaction you want.
> Afterwards the russian propaganda idea was fake news, because there has been no evidence that the election has been strongly manipulated by Russian bots or operatives.
With most propaganda there is some truth. There is some pretty good evidence to suggest that Russia was pumping in propaganda by using bots, trolls, and leaks. But most of it seems unrelated to the election.
So it's an oversimplification to act like none of that was happening. But likewise to assume that it was election-related.
It's annoying because people seem to polarize and pick one side or the other which complicates the fact that the truth is more of a mixture.
Russia was hacking and using computational propaganda. But that doesn't mean it was targeting the election. There are many variables and they aren't all mutually exclusive.
I wonder about the technique of a "shit sandwich" where you surrounded your propoganda (The Russian investigation is BS) with otherwise reasonable content.
Yes. Assange is an excellent barometer for this. When the info Wikileaks was publishing primarily supported the MSM agenda, he was a hero who was fighting for transparency. When it began to counteract that agenda, Assange was denigrated as "a patsy of Russian intelligence", and now "liberal" circles consider everything from Wikileaks tainted. It is especially sad, but not surprising, to see many in the hacker community fall for this blatant propaganda and turn their backs on Wikileaks and Assange so quickly.
The entire playing field is rife with people looking to manipulate and exploit. That should be no mystery to anyone. They do it because it's what works. It's the same in every country. Try to run a noble campaign that exempts itself from the game and you end up like Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, just as trying to run a business while exempting yourself from the game results in fourth-rate also-ran status.
Trump pulled off an amazing feat in destroying this whole apparatus that was set against him (in many cases by simply beating them at their own game -- I'm not trying to claim that his side necessarily used clean tactics), and for anyone who thinks that can all be written off as "fake news" or the even more laughable "Russian interference", well, I have a bridge to sell you. That is a highly simplistic worldview that clearly demonstrates an overriding interest in allegiance to the Democrat tribe more than any serious consideration or critical thinking. To the extent that smart people are involved in propagating these myths, they are doing it for personal gain (see above about playing the game).
> Half of the statements were in fact true, such as Australia is approximately equal in area to the continental United States, whereas the other half were false, such as Zachary Taylor was the first president to die in office (it was William Henry Harrison)
I don't know much of American history but isn't this a high bar for finding if people believe "fake news". I mean most people wont know general knowledge perfectly so expecting them to believe a particular lie is perfectly reasonable.
What is concerning about fake news is people believing simpler lies like the stuff Trump says. An example about walls and whatnot.
There's also something to be said for the importance of a certain fact. It's pretty harmless to be poorly informed about presidential history, unless you're a teacher of the subject or about to take a test. Significantly less so to be poorly informed about whether or not a presidential candidate is running a child sex ring out of a pizzaria.
I found that an odd choice of examples, too. I at least have some sense of the relative sizes of the U.S. and Australia, but without specific knowledge, have no idea about which president died in office first. It's likely I would be more willing to believe a fact if I have nothing to refute it with. I do hope the questions were randomized.
Isn’t this blaming the victim in a way? How is it their fault that they are susceptible to “fake news”. They didn’t chose to be born dumb.
Additionally, does it even matter? Intelligent people have their own blind spots and biases. The biggest being that because they are smart they must be right.
I think the only rational thing to do is to take a skeptical view of any information presented and not internalize it too much. It really irks me when I read something from a “reputable” news source and the only source is “officials familiar with the matter”. I know people are lapping that garbage up, regardless of how smart they are.
Victim blaming requires actually blaming the victim, not just identifying and studying them. If this were an article about genetic predisposition to a particular disease, I don't think you'd call it victim blaming and point out that people without this predisposition get other diseases too.
Victim blaming happens when you explain what they should have done to avoid being victimized. You get a lot closer to that with your final paragraph than the article ever does.
No. This is more similar to finding out that x virus causes y symptoms: that doesn't blame the sick folks for having the virus. It simply explains some stuff that is happening. When we better know what causes something, we are better prepared to do something about it. We have some fact-based reasoning to base our actions on.
It is, indeed, rational to be skeptical of information presented, especially when things are still developing, it is likely that we don't yet have all the facts, or during times of high stress or panic. It is rational to realize we all hold misinformation, and that some of the stuff we've learned is no longer true. But it takes some intelligence to realize this stuff. Furthermore, it takes a bit of energy to do so. Hence otherwise smart folks believing the fake stuff or not being able to pick out truth from the mess. Cognitive ability varies during the day, after all, and with situations (stress, being sleepy or chronic lack of sleep, hangovers, and various other things affect this stuff temporarily at least).
I'll add that some folks that appear "smart" aren't any smarter than the rest of us. Rather, we just meet them in a context that shines the best light on them, they are good at memorizing facts, or their knowledge base differs from our own.
Reminds of Plato's thought that Socrates was like a doctor being judged by a jury of children. His conclusion was to turn against democracy to a vision of a polity ruled by enlightened 'philosopher kings'. So what are the implications for democracy in the Internet age?
Plato was the opposite of a disinterested source on the trial of Socrates. The only other primary source is Xenophon, also his student. I wouldn't call Plato a propagandist, exactly, since that would imply writing on behalf of some organization or movement, but when I read him he seems a persuader in the guise of a truth-seeker. He's sort of the ur-Stephen Jay Gould.
I'd be curious to know whether there was any context given with Nathalie's exoneration. For example, "it was invented by her jealous peer" rather than just "it wasn't true." Might the revelation of deception induce extra skepticism, inhibiting someone from believing the truth? Could a model explaining fake news could help people to better integrate the truth?
Two practical takeaways: (1) The smart thing to do is shake off your first impression and reevaluate after receiving new information. (2) Pay special attention to the first impression you give to stupid people.
Related to this, there is probably a psychological effect at play where people want to be consistent with what they have said in the past (see Cialdini and consistency theories), so just the act of asking the research participants to articulate their feelings about the person dug themselves into a hole. Talk less and you don't have to entrench.
I apologized in a meeting yesterday when I realized I said something factually incorrect. I actually fact checked myself to discover the error. I wonder if that was a mistake. Given how our leaders act, I think we are more wired to trust people who never acknowledge their mistakes.
For purposes of these discussions, it is always conflated with "right of center". Academics accept this as a forgone conclusion, or, at best, use some self-referential circular argument for why the conservative political allegiance is the domain of the less-enlightened, e.g., fewer conservatives went to institutions that are overwhelmingly liberal for career training (university, especially when advanced degrees are considered), or fewer white-collar workers are willing to express conservative views. Neither of these things have much of anything to do with intelligence or stupidity.
Rest assured, there are plenty of blistering idiots on both sides of aisle, in equal proportions that match the idiocy of the general public (roughly 95/5). The amount of people who have the right combination of raw intellect, disregard for social convention, etc., to make independent and objectively defensible arguments that aren't simple regurgitations of the party line is probably 5%. This is true for basically every group and subculture (possibly except those that are so small they don't qualify as their own group/subculture yet).
Even among groups that attract primarily intelligent people in the absolute sense, like software or physics, most don't have the social courage to speak up when they disagree or to align themselves with someone who is clearly in the minority, nor do they have the interest to consider material in-depth and fully understand it in a way that allows them to internalize its principles and detect fakes or imposters. For the most part, they'll happily follow the crowd, no matter how silly the basis.
As a measure of cognitive ability, we used a 10-item vocabulary subtest from the WAIS. In this subtest, participants are presented with a target word and are asked to select the word from a list of five words that comes closest to the meaning of the target word (Cronbach α = 0.67, M = 6.96, SD = 1.90). The participant's score on this test was used as measure of his/her cognitive ability. Although the use of a subscale to measure cognitive ability may be less informative than full-fledged intelligence tests (see De keersmaecker et al., 2017), such tests tapping into a specific aspect of intelligence can be a valid alternative when administration of broad IQ tests are not feasible.
Although I don't think the study mentions "stupid people." And strictly speaking, you're probably not going to be able to administer even the 10-item vocabulary test before deciding how to make a first impression on someone.
Human brains are super hackable. Propaganda or "Fake News" is literally mind control. The Nazi Party infamously exploited this vulnerability. Fox News was created to be "Faux News" from its inception, and it's work just as planned.
What has really upturned the world though, is people's realization that supposedly neutral institutions like CNN/BBC aren't much different from Fox News. The creators of Fox News were never really wrong about that, even if their reaction was to be even more biased and untruthful. The problem is that it's left people grasping for trust. Jon Stewart filled that role for many, but then he got burned out.
The solution to propaganda is to restrict your intake of information to high quality sources. That means finding specific journalists, and never relying on a media brand like Fox News, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, or even Reuters. You simply cannot trust a brand, it's not a person.
Wikipedia points to another solution, which is crowdsourced consensus-based information. Restricting your information diet to Wikipedia might actually be reasonable. The process is fairly rigorous and not easily abused without consequence.
I'm not in any way a supporter of "party" liberalism and would never vote for most mainstream Democratic candidates. And, the world is changing and anointed media outlets providing official agenda and biased spin as truth is apparently over as far as being effective.
(Now that's out of the way): My father in law is a big conservative "fake news" fan. He also watches championship wrestling. I'm not on facebook and don't visit sites of the alt-right persuasion (or really any political persuasion) and so hadn't been exposed to what was happening. And I didn't think anyone really believed far fetched claims. Until we went up for a visit a year or so back and he proceeded to sit with his laptop at dinner proclaiming "Obama is going to jail! it's been proved. He is using someone else's social security number and it's this guy XXX!'. Oh and there was a lot more too! Things I would have believed a rational person of any political persuasion would have questioned. Quite an eye opening experience.
Now, my father in law is not going to be acing medical entrance exams any time soon but he isn't stupid. So I wondered about this phenomenon for a long time. And here's what I concluded. People will willingly suspend rational belief if the payload is something they want to believe or confirms the world of wishes they have built. Smart people, dumb people, all kinds of people.
I don't think there is any possible way someone of even a modicum of intelligence could believe championship wrestling is anything but a falsified show for instance. But he watches it. And he pretends it's real. Because he wants to.
So for all the "smart people" thinking "Oh, I knew it! Only dumb people believe in fake news! And that's how Trump got elected!", different manifestation, same phenomenon. Trying to overcome this tendency is a step towards predictive power but whatever makes a person happy I suppose.
"Fake News" is a political PR term; can't they just talk about returning to baseline values after being given false information?
Also, this is another bad toy problem like the trolley problem; when you hear false information about something from people that you consider trustworthy, after hearing that information corrected it's not altogether rational to return to a baseline judgment of that thing.
When you hear information from trustworthy sources, you know that something attracted the trustworthy people to examine the subjects of that information, something about what the trustworthy people know about those subjects made them think that the information had a reasonable probability of being true, and the trustworthy people thought that information was important enough for you to consider that they communicated it to you. We want things in courts to be considered in isolation, because the courts are meant to be a final arbiter, and therefore the feedback effect of suspicion feeding suspicion would tend to make the first statement of an authority figure on a person the final judgment of the state on that person. Life is different; if you disregard rumors, and the context of statements (even when ultimately disregarding the content of statements) you're missing a lot.
The problem here is who you trust, not what you trust, and the ability to update trust, not as much the ability to update judgments on things unobserved and unexperienced.
I'd submit that people with lower "cognitive skills" would tend to trust the researchers more, and think that even if the researcher has withdrawn statements about events, they must have had a good reason for thinking them in the first place, and would have made a reasonable effort to avoid lying intentionally. On the other hand, people with higher "cognitive skills" would be more familiar with the format of experiments, and assume that the researcher was lying about everything, and that "Nathalie" didn't exist.
tl;dr, basically, the researchers weren't wearing the right outfit to convince one of the groups.
It seems the conclusion here is that: Lies work even after being disproven, especially on people with lower cognitive ability.
The first follow up I have is: How do they define 'lower' cognitive ability?
Assuming they're using IQ score or similar tests that go into an IQ score, what is the transition point? Are we talking about people who are below the norm -1 SD (~85 IQ), around the average of 100, or +1 SD (~115)?
The number of people in/below those ranges are progressively bigger and have a larger impact on things like the popular vote, market trends, etc.
The second follow up I have is: Ok, so now what?
Since this is "cognitive ability" and not "education" convincing people to go to college isn't a solution.
Do you limit voting to people with certain advanced degrees? Do they propose an IQ (or equivalent) test for voting?
Teaching meta-cognition abilities to the masses seems unlikely. How wrong would it be to use the principles in this article for "good" i.e. anti-propaganda propaganda?
This article is about fake news generally, not Trump supporters specifically. None of the research itself seems to target any political leaning.
That said, you seem to misunderstand probability. The 18% probably of a Trump victory is greater than one in six. You are less likely to die playing a single round of Russian Roulette than for Trump to have won the election. Something can be 82% like and still not happen, and something can be 18% likely and happen. That's how probability works.
As for the USSC and the travel ban... what? I remember the USSC allowing the third revision of the ban to take effect while under appeal, but I'm drawing a blank on a unanimous victory. There were at least two justices who stated they were against even that temporary decision, as I recall it. I'm very interested in a source for "a 7-0 supreme court victory."
> I remember that "election dial" showing 80% chance of Hillary on (I believe) the NYT website. Was that grounded in reality?
Yes, it was. The implication that predictions were not grounded in reality because they didn't come to pass is false.
An 80% chance of Hillary winning is a 20% chance of Trump winning. 20% is a big number. You wouldn't play Russian roulette, even though the probability that you die is less than that.
Please stop spreading fake news. There was no 7-0 victory for the travel ban, because an actual review hasn't happened yet. Even for the latest revision there was no vote because, although 2 members said they would vote against it, a stay was lifted until they could. They announced that they would hear it (but
I haven't seen a date) in Jan 19th.
I'm actually not surprised that journalists overestimated Hillary's chance of winning. As a group, they are predominantly coastal and almost uniformly college educated. Both of those groups broke disproportionately toward Hillary.
Non-college educated Americans broke disproportionately toward Trump. It would seem given the relationship between college graduation and cognitive ability (the bottom 20% in cognitive ability rarely graduates from college) that this is reasonable support for the correlation of fake news belief with Trump support.
> Oh, wait, no, they're saying Trump supporters are the ones with cognitive ability issues
Please quote the part of the article where "they" say this, otherwise don't post this kind of nonsense. You're not flipping anything around; you're the one poisoning the well.
Yeah, the comment you're replying to reeks of partisan bias and very conveniently ignores reality in favor of the type of headlines that would show up on Fox News.
I don't think they're arguing in good faith, regardless of whether they're """playing""" devil's advocate.
I think calling Trump supporters dumb is a different problem from a poll being wrong. Rather are polls wrong if they X has a high chance of happening but then x did not happen?
The polls weren't even that far off, on a national level they were basically spot on, the organizations reporting on them just threw out the data that made it look like Trump had a pretty good chance. 538 did a slightly better job but the editorial bias in the presentation of the data was distinct across most of the media.
I don't think it's the polls on their own that are the problem. I think it's the media-driven furore around them that feeds into the public's pre-existing confirmation bias ("see, the polls prove he's an idiot with no chance at the presidency!").
It seems like most people on both ends of the political spectrum create a media-fed bubble of bias, and when the outcomes disagree with that bias (as in the case of Trump) it can create pretty damaging cognitive dissonance.
Fake news was barely even mentioned until about two days after the election and the Dem spin machine whirred into action coming up with plausible sounding reasons why the loss wasn't their fault.
There were many articles about it before that. It was a constant topic of conversation in some circles.
The reason the Trends chart jumps after the election is because that's when the larger public learned about what is going on, and people were trying to figure out how it happened.
No, the larger public learned about it in November because that's when the Democratic party aligned media (e.g. CNN, CNBC) suddenly considered it headline news. Look at that google trends spike. Did that look natural?
They picked two stories for explaining the loss and pushed them extremely hard - this and the Russian conspiracy stuff.
Both stories share one salient characteristic - if both were reason for the election loss, neither the Democratic party nor Hillary could be blamed for it.
It is unlikely that news media that aligns with and donates money to the Democratic party are going to run stories about how Hillary was a terrible candidate who shouldn't have been allowed to run in the first place any more than Fox News might suddenly start supporting Democrats one day.
There is no reply link on your comment, so I'll reply here.
Fake news was a huge issue before the election. People I know were discussing it daily.
Of course the Democratic Party talked about it after the election. What else would be expected? Many people who were paying attention were talking about it before that as well. You should read those articles I posted.
The Democratic Party and its candidate had problems, but that doesn't diminish the role of fake news.
what a load of rubbish. fake news & social engineering has always been around. it's just there are more channels for it nowadays, and due to the freedom of publish, those at top have to mix a lot of truth with a bit of nonsense, to keep control
That’s like writing off the green revolution because farming has been around forever. We have fewer barriers than before: a website is cheap to run compared to a newspaper or broadcast station and there’s no border restriction – no Moldovan teenager could send TV programs or newspapers to gullible Americans. That’s a huge difference: if a newspaper printed libel they could be sued and had physical assets to risk losing. Companies had reputations which took years to build or change. Now it’s just a sea of shell companies and disposable websites and if, hypothetically, a bunch of Republicans started caring that Breitbart was lying so routinely the same stuff would just pop up on a new domain a day later.
That’s the other key point you missed: distribution and discovery are totally different now. If I set up a newspaper I still had to convince people to subscribe or stock it, TV stations took years to setup, etc. That encouraged moderation to maximize the number of customers. In contrast, now everyone is competing on Facebook and Google News, both of which hate the idea of paying for editorial review and will cheerfully display satire or propaganda on equal footing with established mainstream news sources.
I’m not in love with the gatekeeper model – note that e.g. the 90s Balkan & Rwandan genocides relied on taking over the state media first – but that doesn’t mean that we can ignore the problems we’re seeing now, or that tech companies aren’t being incredibly reckless in their desire to make a slightly higher margin on ad revenue.
Didn't miss distribution & discovery. Distribution is different nowadays of course (hence the social engineering program is very clever and will feed you a lot of truth and grab you if you're seeking truth - i.e. all prominent 'alternative' sources). Discovery? Well, no not really. Discovery for the masses is at the will of the centralised social engineering program (Google, Facebook, etc)
When anything significant happens in western politics you can better you bottom dollar it wasn't an un-staged occurrence. Trump was your man before election day. Brexit was the ultimate divisive illusionary 'you have a choice, you can make a difference' nonsense, despite the fact that having one less centralised corrupt level of power is of course worthy of a vote.
Journalism is a dead as a dodo.
Have you been psyop-d into attributing tin-foil hats to anyone who raises there head from the Orwellian / Huxley media sources and takes stock of history, and seeks alternatives from the mainstream, rather than the brain-rotting recycling 'news'. Does 'conspiracy theorist' make your alarm bells go off and want to cease all association?
The thing to invest in is local. Turn away from centralisation for now, until the whole thing is open sourced and you can track your politicians lives into the intimate details, and you have a monetary system that's not debt-based. Once that day comes maybe local won't be your only avenue for hope.
So true. Fake news/social engineering has been around since at least The creation of the bible. But now fake news can reach people faster, spread more quickly, and be consumed in larger quantities because of facebook.
I was surprised that he didn't check out his sources or information before forwarding information: snopes.com and other sites are so readily available and easy to use. I even suggested casually one day how he could check internet rumors with snopes, and he listened, but only muted his forwarding awhile.
So I set up a rule routing his e-mail to a separate folder that I check occasionally. I keep the good jokes and flush the fake news. Nonetheless I find it useful for keeping a finger on him and others who are seriously misled or subject to rumors. That way, I know something of what they think and I can still talk to them w/o being shocked.
I don't want to refuse someone as a person b/c they're not particularly bright or b/c they are unable to navigate the internet sufficiently to check what is true/false. This way I know a little of what they're thinking on current events and can approach them w/o offending them. And I get to hear the good jokes, which I cannot resist!