Media is complicit in this, not the victim. By presenting "both sides" equally in many contexts, they give the false impression that the case of the denialists is equally strong.
Just because there are two sides does not mean there are two equally valid sides. And presenting them as such is a form of bias. Quite a pernicious one.
This is common practice in all sorts of stories. Journalists are trained to solicit / include some counterpoint or naysaying voice, no matter the topic. Even if the story is otherwise uncontroversial.
>By presenting "both sides" equally in many contexts
This was the mantra of the new atheist/skeptic movement of the early 2010s - that it wasn't worth to present the other side because the other side is just wrong. Given how this mantra is applied today where 'the other side' should not be heard from or platformed or is just plain evil, I'd rather hear both sides, even if that means I get to hear about creationism or climate change denial.
I don't want the media or tech companies to be the arbiter on what is and isn't reasonable to discuss. Having Jack Dorsey or some intern at some fact check org decide for me what is and isn't reasonable is much worse than merely hearing from a creationist why creationism should be taught in science class.
I mean, do you propose equal time be given to evolution & creationism then or what? I would rather students spend 99.9% of the time on evolution and yeah I guess you can spend the 0.1% time as footnote of what crazy people believe in if you really want.
>I mean, do you propose equal time be given to evolution & creationism then or what?
I support journalists making an effort to present both sides even if one side is unreasonable, because the alternative is they just decide for me what I should and should not be exposed to. That, to me, is much much worse.
It's never "both sides" unless someone's actively trying to push a wedge issue for political gain. It's almost always "lots of varied ways to be wrong, and one way we're pretty sure is right" and if you try to present them all, the one that's right gets drowned out in the volume of dross. Journalism must be curation or there's no point.
The standard I advocate for is for journalists to make an effort to present both sides. There will always be a level of editorializing and they will get it wrong from time to time, but at least they are committed to the principle and there is underlying respect for the audience to make up their own mind.
Not like what OP and you are advocating for - where you want the media to make decisions for you what you may or may no hear because god forbid the media 'platforms' someone that may actually change your mind.
So let me ask you because I am curious: What is your limiting principle? At what point do YOU stop delegating to some doofus anchor what you should and shouldn't be exposed to?
Well, when the overwhelming majority of experts in the field agree, I think it’s best to not waste brain space on crackpot contrarian positions, especially if they are incredibly well funded from obviously motivated actors.
>Well, when the overwhelming majority of experts in the field agree
You're conflating some issues here. Experts inform policy, not set policy. Democratically elected representatives should use experts but not delegate decision making to experts. Take climate change, even if 100% of scientist believe in climate change and certain outcomes of climate change, because any climate mitigations are going to drastically impact my life and the lives of all my fellow-citizens, I sure as heck want to hear alternatives and understand the full implications. I don't want climate scientists deciding climate policy (only informing it), because the cost for stemming climate change may be too high and when balancing all the other factors, we may instead decide instead to focus on mitigating the effects of climate change.
We see this with Coronavirus policy as well. Certain public health officials only focus on stemming the pandemic (a noble goal in a vacuum), but ignore the cost associated with some of the drastic measures to stem the pandemic (like lockdowns). Put another way, even if every single epidemiologist argues that lockdown is the best way to 'flatten the curve', we may decide to do something else because we need to balance all kinds of other factors in addition to 'flattening the curve'. The Great Barrington Declaration [1], for example, which presents an alterative coronavirus policy by all kinds of public health officials makes this case and has been censored by Twitter, and others, for it. Don't you think their point of view is a worthy topic for discussion? Or is this one of those things where you are afraid of 'platforming' an alternative lest it convinces some people?
Don't be ridiculous. My preferred political party does not have a vested financial interest in those theories, so of course they shouldn't get equal airtime.
The standard I advocate for is for journalists to make an effort to present both sides. There will always be a level of editorializing and they will get it wrong from time to time, but at least they are committed to the principle and there is underlying respect for the audience to make up their own mind.
Not like what you seem to advocating for - where you want the media to make the decisions for you to what you're exposed to .. because god forbid the media 'platforms' someone that may actually change your mind.
So let me ask you because I am curious: What is your limiting principle? At what point do YOU stop delegating to some doofus anchor what you should and shouldn't be exposed to?
"Equal time" derives from the days of media broadcast over radio waves, where every broadcast came at the expense of some other one because there was a finite amount of broadcast radio spectrum.
It's irrelevant to on-demand content delivery methods like the internet, where you can carry everything at once.
Having Jack Dorsey or some intern at some fact check org decide for me what is and isn't reasonable is much worse[…]
No one's saying that he should, so this is a strawman. Also let's not conflate social media (dumb-pipes for following anyone) with newspapers and cable "news" (editorial, selective).
>No one's saying that he should, so this is a strawman.
What are you talking about? Where have you been since 2016? Democrats and media is pushing Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to increase censorship of right-wing viewpoints.
>Also let's not conflate social media (dumb-pipes for following anyone) with newspapers and cable "news" (editorial, selective).
Social media is exerting more and more editorial control and acting more like a publisher and not a platform. I get that there will always be some of standards that not every person will like (since those companies do not want their networks to be used for crime or spam, for example), but the way Twitter and Facebook shut down the Hunter Biden is insane and I don't understand why nobody is not bothered by it.
Another is also the politization of issues... if you first argue against climate change, and then you argue against meat because of climate change, then I know you’re just using it to push your preferred ideology. How can I be sure you’re also not pushing climate change itself just as ideology?
Note: I agree that less meat is a solution (or part of a solution), but unacceptable to push it as the solution, instead of e.g. general carbon taxation...
> I used to believe in climate change, then I studied feminism in depth. I don’t believe in climate change anymore.
Wait wait wait, are you actually saying that poor quality research in field X convinced you that field Y also has poor quality research? How does this make sense?
We all know that a lot of results in the social sciences are garbage, but climate science is based by a completely different methodology. It is backed by concrete measurements, taken over decades all around the world, instead of surveys with N=12. The forecasts are made with simulations based on physical theories, tested and validated independently. And the whole field (not the government, the actual scientists) meet every year to agree on the new state of the art for climate modeling.
How is any of this remotely related to gender studies?
As a side note,
> [...] try becoming expert in a domain that is in the news [...]
How long does it take for you to consider yourself an "expert" in a field?
How is any of this remotely related to gender studies?
The bizarreness of linking feminism to climate change notwithstanding, I think that in the interest of productive discussion on HN, an interesting point can be found within it.
A lot of the fuel for the opposition to both feminism and climate change comes from the way both are portrayed in the media. When people are repeatedly brow-beaten with an idea, and anyone who dissents is ostracized and insulted, it causes onlookers to move away from the position that is being shoved in their faces.
These techniques are sometimes misapplied in both equal rights and climate change, which ultimately hurts both causes. These techniques might strengthen an already committed base, but they polarize and antagonize everyone not already sold.
This comic [0], linked last week in a different thread [1], shows the same thing in visual form, and I think there's merit to the concept that overly vociferous opposition to idea X actually increases support of idea X.
> and I think there's merit to the concept that overly vociferous opposition to idea X actually increases support of idea X.
It’s an interesting concept, but I wonder why it applies for some ideas and not others. There are plenty of ideas with vociferous opposition that don’t seem to cause an increase—murder, elder abuse, cannibalism, human trafficking. What would cause some ideas to spread via opposition, and not others?
> What would cause some ideas to spread via opposition, and not others?
The widespread opposition to cannibalism is not publicized because essentially everyone is agreed and there is nothing to discuss. It isn't the case that Democrats are anti-cannibalism and Republicans are pro-cannibalism. There are no prominent existing supporters of cannibalism to vociferously condemn.
Climate change and feminism have factions to fight each other. Oil workers in Texas don't want to lose their livelihood. Homeowners in California don't want extreme fires to claim their homes. Women want more rapists to go to jail. Men don't want to be falsely imprisoned for an alleged rape that didn't really happen.
So you can find plenty of people to argue that climate change is over-hyped, and plenty of people willing to believe them because it serves their own interests, and therefore plenty of people on the other team to be unnecessarily vicious to those people to the point of making their own side look bad.
I can't read the flagged comment, but just the quoted part of the comment in this post seems true to me, even if your "why not these" lists are interesting.. but not a negation of the quoted idea.
Also seems to be compatible with the idea, which has gotten a lot of play in the Social Dilemma Netflix movie, that people engage harder with things they disagree with, and not so much at all with positions they do.
> The forecasts are made with simulations based on physical theories...
Note that here you're talking only about the fundamental findings of climate science, but when people talk about the effects and dangers of climate change, they talk about consequences that are often far down a causal chain (local weather patterns, agriculture, social impacts, health, etc.).
So without realising it you just attributed to all the research that is connected to climate change the same level of precision of a small subset of it, which is obviously undue.
> Wait wait wait, are you actually saying that poor quality research in field X convinced you that field Y also has poor quality research? How does this make sense?
I'm not sure that was the case being made. It's not the quality of the research, it's the quality of the journalism, which in turn demonstrates that the journalism is of sufficiently low quality as to be incapable of revealing the existence of propaganda-quality research.
Then the problem becomes that if you can't trust the media coverage, you would have to go to the primary sources. But what percentage of people have the time and competence to actually do that?
> How long does it take for you to consider yourself an "expert" in a field?
The poster is clearly referring to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
> It's not the quality of the research, it's the quality of the journalism
It's not only that. At some point you realise that even science with all its safeguards is not indifferent to the dominant, accepted belief systems. People simply align with a group and will blindly repeat anything, even self-contradictory statements, as long as it's expected by their peers. It's quite uncanny when you notice it for the first time.
That's because the safeguards in science guard against unintentional error.
Peer review isn't robust against political alignment because if the author and the reviewers are all making the same false unstated assumption, nobody is looking in the direction of the error. And it gets even worse if people who do see it are penalized for saying so.
The scientific method assumes good faith, good skepticism and a willingness to admit mistakes. Without that you're doing politics, not science.
> "I’m sorry, it may be possible that climate change is real, it is just that we have no proof of it, except by people who also claim the feminist science is true."
This is one of the most absurd strawman critiques of climate science ever.
It sounds like you've found good reason to be skeptical about popularized anti-male research.
But I'm confused by how strong of a statement you're making about climate change:
> ..., it may be possible that climate change is real, it is just that we have no proof of it, except by people who also claim the feminist science is true."
Wouldn't you need to really dig into original sources to conclude that no such evidence exists?
Just because there are two sides does not mean there are two equally valid sides. And presenting them as such is a form of bias. Quite a pernicious one.
This is common practice in all sorts of stories. Journalists are trained to solicit / include some counterpoint or naysaying voice, no matter the topic. Even if the story is otherwise uncontroversial.