>If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
I'm not sure I understand why this would necessarily be what you would expect. I would say it's entirely the other way around. If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists, that might be at the frontier of the outer limits of the capability we're able to reach, so it might only show up in certain pockets or subsets of our overall population. Getting there would still hinge on favorable probabilities and circumstances that might only obtain in a small percentage of cases.
As for Socrates, I must confess I am rather smitten with him as a historical figure and as a philosopher, but for the many great things that Socrates is, I don't think he's a reliable authority for the evolutionary history of humanity writ large. I suspect that you're entirely right that oral traditions are more emotionally resonant and powerful than written traditions. But don't think there's any logical fallacy or contradiction in supposing that nevertheless a written tradition could emerge in parallel with oral traditions.
I suppose I do agree with your end point though, which is that I'm not sure that a disposition towards the writing can be pointed to as like a singular thing that's at the essence of what it is to be human. In fact, I would say that that very question is kind of romanticized and abstract in a way that doesn't make clear contact with our scientific understanding and therefore is kind of a malformed question. But I don't have to agree with that form of question to nevertheless believe that our capability to put language into a written form had rather transcendent consequences for us as a species.
> If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists
Intelligence - predicting the future rather than reacting to the present - unlocks the possibility of communicating about the future rather than just the present (basic animal calls - predator alerts, intimidation threats, mating calls, etc), which means the message can have value in the future if stored and transmitted (unlike a predator alert which is useless if not delivered in the moment).
It seems that writing, or proto-writing (drawings become symbolic glyphs?), probably developed before message carrying/sending, which then becomes the big capability unlock - the ability to send/spread information and therefore for humans to become a "collective intelligence" able to build upon each other's discoveries.
It's interesting why some groups of humans never culturally developed along this path though - aboriginees and forest peoples who have no written language. Is it because of their mode of life, or population density perhaps? Cultural isolation? Why have these groups not found the utility for written language?
Apparently as recently as 1800 global literacy rate was only around 10% - perhaps just a reflection that in the modern world you can passively benefit from the products of our collective intelligence without yourself being part of the exchange, or perhaps a reflection that desire for information is not the norm for our species - more for the intelligentsia?!
Yes, and perhaps a different way of saying the same thing, but traveling long distances to capture prey and, at times, return to the nest to feed the young, may invite a proclivity for abstract thinking.
It's perhaps not a coincidence that humans have at least something in common with birds in terms of evolutionary heritage that predisposed us to covering vast amounts of terrain.
I think I can't really accept that framing on a number of levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W. Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them."
I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
It’s certainly the case that there is overlap with the positions of the State Department and the truth. But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth. That’s how they’re treated, however. In fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic, etc.
> but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this.
Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests.
The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest?
This feels largely like a gish gallop away from the parts of topic that would be pertinent to the article. The article in question here is about This American life and I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives. I think it had a lot more to do with the credibility of this American life, the motivations of the person being interviewed as the primary source for the story, and the narrative beats that this American life was interested in representing to its audience.
>But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth.
I don't know that anyone here is making that argument, so I'm not sure it's a prudent use of time to be engaging with it, and I think engaging would take us further away from the article with increasingly diminishing returns.
> I don't think the reason it got past people's critical filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe state department narratives.
It’s valid to think that. But what actually happened was that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting bits of Americana that he and his team could validate independently, or brought in credible journalists well versed in the topics he was covering, he could’ve avoided this. But he didn’t. Why didn’t he feel that he needed to adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to be true.
Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse:
>Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.
The case in point was about legal immigrants accused of eating their neighbors pets and taking their jobs. Neither was true.
Your factcheck needs to be factchecked. Accusing me of being dishonest and acting in bad faith is a hoot. I may be ignorant of certain things but I'm only interested in the truth as I can best discover it.
I would love to have debate with someone from "your side", but you are, at best, a troll and haven't demonstrated any good faith.
I know this is not a new post at this point, but these claims are always wild to me from educated people. How on earth can you seriously believe that something is 100% not true, or debunked, when the claim could cover thousands of people in an environment over many months or years? Do you have video evidence of every second of every persons life over this timeframe that is indisputable? How can you possible know without a shadow of a doubt that this never happened? It's ludicrous.
What if you flipped the scenario and you heard of Americans living in India and locals claimed they have seen them killing and eating local cows? Would that just be incredibly unbelievable to you? Its just absurd to suggest that it just absolutely, 100% never happened, and everybody who has anecdotal evidence is just some racist idiot making stuff up.
And I know you won't believe me, but I actually live adjacent to one of the towns that received a large influx of Haitian migrants. Not Springfield, but a city that was also regularly mentioned on the news, and I saw evidence of the claims that were being spoken at those town halls myself. Our town literally had to put out city notices to ask people to refrain from shooting blow darts into the geese down at our local park, a place where the Haitians were known to loiter all day long for months on end, since they had nothing else to do or anywhere else to go. All of this shit was not just made up, I guarantee it. These were not all model citizens.
Now I am sure this is the part where you call me, a mixed race person who has a child with a minority mother, a racist.
There was a biography that came out, I believe roughly around 2004, that was revealed to have significant fabrications. The excuse making for it revolved around the notion of "lying to reveal a greater truth".
This is the same mentality some people have for coming up with hate crime hoaxes (if it isn't for attention seeking).
I personally find it to be intellectually bankrupt and counter-productive; people willing to blind themselves to a problem will use such examples as evidence that all such claims are false.
Wholeheartedly agree, and if you can remember any more about the biography, I'd be curious to know.
I feel like I have a little essay brewing within me about these various examples of indifference to truth and the way they're rationalized. One example is this particular episode of This American Life. Another is Hassan Minaj's Notion of Emotional Truths. Another is Samsung's Faking moon photos and how they tried to blur the lines between image processing and fake photos.
And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as important as the story itself.
It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?
So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think the implication should be that 100% or something near it of the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that led to this particular story unraveling, are vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories unraveling.
If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet.
I made no extrapolation. I said that we haven't measured the reliability of the earlier stories. Instead of having a reliable measurement, we're going with our much-less-reliable assumptions (prior beliefs).
The interesting thing, I think, is those prior beliefs. Your prior beliefs, it would seem, include the belief TAL's stories are generally reliable. You believe it strongly enough that you write that doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories is an "over correction in the wrong direction."
I don't think it's an overcorrection. When we find evidence of one fabrication from a trusted source, that source ought to lose trust. If we want to know how much trust it should lose, we have to measure. When we don't measure, when we don't take seriously the responsibility to ground our beliefs, that's how we end up with things like the replication crisis in psychology.
You're extrapolating from the Daisy incident to doubt of their previous reporting. And believe that the Daisy incident merits responding by holding TAL to a newly escalated standard for verification. From this most recent comment of yours, you seem comfortable with "doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories" as a position you view to be not an over correction. I think you're underestimating how an extreme a position that is, and kind of equivocating between ordinary skepticism and doubting the veracity of their previous stories.
You're right that I believe TAL's stories are generally reliable, that I believe doubting them is an over-correction in the wrong direction.
I also don't think I agree that it's simply a matter of checking or not checking because I believe the vast body of work that's been free from error, although exposed to the same conditions of public scrutiny that could have revealed error in just the same way as with the Daisy story, is part of the body of evidence that actively testifies in favor of TAL. And I do think if there was more of a rocky track record, or if there proves to be more of one in the future, it absolutely could merit spot checking. And as I've said twice now already, I've given the example of Stephen Glass as a case where that skepticism was warranted.
You seem to be implying that I have a categorical opposition to spot checking which couldn't be further from the truth. I just don't think it's warranted in this instance, because it's not a reasonable extrapolation from what happened with the Daisy story.
You're inferring a lot that I didn't write or even imply. I'll be clear about my beliefs:
1. I just learned from the article about the fabricated Daisey episode and that TAL started using professional fact checkers only afterward. I was surprised on both counts.
2. I saw your comment that it would be in poor character to discredit TAL's prior reporting on the basis of this one failure.
3. I responded that it would be telling to actually estimate the reliability of earlier episodes because, right now, we're just going off our personal beliefs (and these probably vary widely from person to person).
4. You and I had a back and forth, mainly talking past one another.
5. I think that if we did actually measure the reliability of prior episodes, it would be less than a lot of TAL defenders expect and greater than a lot of TAL doubters expect.
6. As for what's reasonable vs. over correction to take away from the article, that depends largely on your prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general.
Note that point 5, being a product of my prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general, is actually an example of point 6 in action.
You never had a reason to trust TAL's reporting before the Daisey incident. You maybe trusted it because it is on the radio, and you trust people who can afford a radio station; or because it was on an NPR station, and you trust NPR.
This is pragmatic as long as you have no evidence either way and you're not basing any serious decisions on this "trust." But the fact that they didn't bother to fact check Daisey, and in fact had never fact-checked before that: this is actually the first information you have about TAL's internal processes. It should vastly outweigh it being on the radio.
This comes off like fandom. You seem to have an interest in this incident not affecting people's perception of the quality of TAL, but I have no idea what that interest would be. It shouldn't bother you that people see the show as a place whose facts should be checked if one is considering spreading them.
Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated. As they say, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. To choose something less extreme: an unreliable employee may still show up for work 80% of the time.
When their methodology prior to a particular point of time was shown to be weak, and the programs from that time are still available (the archives go back 30 years), I think that asking for spot checking of those old episodes is legitimate. The key thing here are the archives. If the archives weren't available it would be much easier to shrug and say, "live and learn."
There's reason to be more optimistic than this. There is, to some extent, an automatic post-hoc fact checking process built in to being such a high profile publication. For example, the Daisy narrative was challenged because someone with some personal knowledge of the subject heard the show.
It's much better and less embarrassing to get the fact checking right before publication, but the truth generally comes out one way or another. So I'm willing to give historic TAL... not certainty, but at least the benefit of the doubt.
>Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated.
I generally understand that to be true, but that was not the upshot of the point being made by the other commenter. Their extrapolation was a much more along the lines of treating it like an open question whether the other stories were fabricated at a level of elevated suspicion that calls for spot checking.
All the other stories were vulnerable to being upended just like this one and seem to have withstood the test of time. I also think that despite this particular story falling apart, TAL has a track record of credibility and vetting that is more legitimate than is being implied by casting doubt over the history of theirs, and I did contrast it to the case of Stephen Glass, which model conditions where that degree of skepticism is more appropriately warranted.
Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the previous narratives with known public knowledge of the events, to determine if the narratives provided an accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth and still tell no lies.
So... I can speak to this because I've listened to almost the entire TAL back catalog, lol.
The show has a stronger journalistic focus now than it did 10 years ago and _way_ more than it did 20 or (almost!) 30 years ago. It's always been part of the show—people who complain that TAL "didn't used to be political" clearly don't remember how many segments they ran about the Iraq war—but for the first decade or so the show had a very strong focus on the arts; they'd have a lot of guests sharing personal essays, short fiction, etc.
The serious journalism-type stories were generally either (1) on-the-ground reporting from their own staff, like a really great episode where they toured an aircraft carrier (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/206/somewhere-in-the-arabia...), (2) stories sourced from other journalists or professional organizations who had serious reputation to lose if they were caught in the supply chain of misinformation, or (3) "this is a thing that happened to me"-type firsthand accounts and observations. And I guess the now-debunked Apple factory story falls into the third category, but the types of stories that had previously fallen into that category tended to be far smaller in scale and/or were presented as more subjective than the Apple story had been.
All of that to say that I think you raise a valid question, and I'm sure some stuff slipped through the cracks over the years, but I also think the implication of that crack-slipping was far less dire in the show's earlier days, and there were just fewer news-ish stories overall.
The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story:
>Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.
This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism.
Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.
That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.
TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.
So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
>have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist
I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation. I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making, which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild. And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it has anything to do with the reason why this particular story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to the task over and over again of vetting the stories and not running into this problem, so I would vehemently disagree with the idea that it's something built into the nature of their programming that made this happen when we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700 and counting.
I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a TAL story must originate independently from a journalist, and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate from what you might typically call a source or what I might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party reporters, they also use in-house producers because they themselves are perfectly capable of being that journalistic origination of the story through which we understand it to be vetted.
Also weren't you originally saying that the story was true? I'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm finding no trace of explanation for that in this new volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.
The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully, because as I understand you, you're not describing an "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any obligation to be factual and accurate!".
Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.
The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit of making the front page a picture captioned with a joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15 years of me knowing the magazine existed.
Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.
I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry. Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance, and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest, and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to take the blame."
Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.
That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream news to be literally true, even if told from a particular perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who reported the story."
Love it or hate it, her novels, over and over again could set generations of young minds on fire, which her essays could never do. I think it's fair to say the non-fiction was a lot worse.
>none of the characters in her books are self sufficient.
I think they were in the sense that they, within the fiction of the books, had irreplaceable economic skills that made them fortunes. They were (again just in the logic of the books), more than pulling their weight.
Doesn't mean I agree with it as a system but I can see the internal consistency in this respect at least.
Aside from Galt's Gulch, there's also Dagny's brief stint on her own, during which she more or less magically automates everything that needs to be done.
The attempt by Randians to apply her to modern politics was a major tell when I was young to get out of that crowd. One person, supposedly a an intellectual leading light of Objectivism at the time, said that nuking Iran was fine because Iran pursing nuclear enrichment constituted "initiation of force" (important term of art in the Rand lexicography), seemingly squaring the circle between Rand's brand of hardcore libertarian isolationism and neocon warmongering that was popular at the time.
I wanted to see intellectual hero philosophers as the legacy, but what objectivism produced, outside of Nathaneil Branden and David Kelly who were at least interesting, was largely a complete joke.
He suggested on a podcast that if a woman had no access to resources to perform an abortion she should throw herself down the stairs. Presumably as a way to solve it that doesn't involve getting freebies from the state.
I'm not sure I understand why this would necessarily be what you would expect. I would say it's entirely the other way around. If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists, that might be at the frontier of the outer limits of the capability we're able to reach, so it might only show up in certain pockets or subsets of our overall population. Getting there would still hinge on favorable probabilities and circumstances that might only obtain in a small percentage of cases.
As for Socrates, I must confess I am rather smitten with him as a historical figure and as a philosopher, but for the many great things that Socrates is, I don't think he's a reliable authority for the evolutionary history of humanity writ large. I suspect that you're entirely right that oral traditions are more emotionally resonant and powerful than written traditions. But don't think there's any logical fallacy or contradiction in supposing that nevertheless a written tradition could emerge in parallel with oral traditions.
I suppose I do agree with your end point though, which is that I'm not sure that a disposition towards the writing can be pointed to as like a singular thing that's at the essence of what it is to be human. In fact, I would say that that very question is kind of romanticized and abstract in a way that doesn't make clear contact with our scientific understanding and therefore is kind of a malformed question. But I don't have to agree with that form of question to nevertheless believe that our capability to put language into a written form had rather transcendent consequences for us as a species.