Combating disinformation with humility

https://praveshkoirala.com/2021/11/03/combating-disinformation-with-humility/

by pkoird • 5 years ago

76 75 5 years ago

rektide2• 5 years ago

humility & openness to discussion is a minimum bar society can possibly accept. it just has to be there. you cant negotiate with the pre-polarized.

msandford• 5 years ago

I agree. Vaccines are neither 100.00% safe nor are they mind control chips.

Granted they're much, much closer to safe than they are mind control. But waving away safety concerns is dangerous too.

rektide2• 5 years ago

vaccines make up like 1% of this article. i'm not sure what posturing you're aiming for but i it doesn't jive with my read about this topic & this article. the ideas & values being discussed here are at a much more abstract level.

skybrian• 5 years ago

I think this is a promising start! However, it’s a rather abstract argument and might be improved by concrete examples.

One aspect of humility might be to avoid abstract generalizations and stick to shallow observations. For example, instead of arguing that some kinds of architecture are good and other kinds of architecture are terrible, and speculating about why, you could simply say, “this building looks good to me” and “I don’t like how this building looks.”

Or you could say that a particular article seems plausible or implausible to you, rather than saying it’s true or false.

But making universal-sounding claims is an ingrained habit that seems hard to shake.

cracell• 5 years ago

I think we need to find a better way for the philosophy behind the scientific method to click.

The entire idea of a "fact" is flawed. We simply have more good evidence for some things than others. Teaching people to critically evaluate and compare the evidence is the trick.

Perhaps studying different perspectives of a politically neutral historic event would help people to understand.

Jensson8• 5 years ago

The entire idea of a "fact" is flawed.

No, we have a lot of facts. Science is the art of creating models based on facts. Those models aren't facts however which is the misconception.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

I think what confuses people is that the data isn't the facts either. We derive data from the facts, and use the data to test models.

If you go read an empirical paper, there are plenty of facts there, all in a single section that details the experimental outcome. All the other sections are derived (conclusion, abstract) or invented (methodology).

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

Except for facts of the subjective experience of sense data, empiricism (including science) doesn’t deal in facts, it deals in contingent conclusions drawn from models adopted to explain the relationships between facts (in the narrow domain admitted previously.)

tomrod6• 5 years ago

Parsimonious models at that!

tomrod6• 5 years ago

Your user name as of 11/4/2021 is cracell.

This is a fact.

Where is the flaw?

aspenmayer5• 5 years ago

The one posting may not be the legitimate owner of the account?

watwut• 5 years ago

1.) I have seen people claim their subjective opinions are "fact" just because they expressed them authoritatively and with conviction. It is not rare, it is super frequent.

And it is frequent especially in tech and adjacent communities that frame themselves as rational or scientific.

2.) With history in particular, selecting which facts you use makes massive difference. You can tell technically truth statements, leave out context and end up with a massive lie about what happened. You can switch victim and aggressor, make assholes into heroes and so on.

Same exact effect is in economy and other fields, but with history it is super easily apparent.

stolenmerch• 5 years ago

I really love Julia Galef's take on this in the book "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't". It's not quite humility, but it's close. Instead of trying to win arguments, try to find out what's true. Be humble in what you know and don't know. Every once and a while try to calibrate your confidence. [0]

[0] http://confidence.success-equation.com/

aspenmayer5• 5 years ago

That’s a neat concept for a site. A bit Australia specific for some of the trivia, but that likely doesn’t matter, because you aren’t penalized in any way for getting questions wrong. It’s a way of showing your own bias in your own confidence.

Is there more info about this site and what it’s intended audience and goals are?

GlennS• 5 years ago

Interesting bias there - I would have said it was a bit US specific?

Maybe it's just a bit English-speaking specific?

Jensson8• 5 years ago

Every once and a while try to calibrate your confidence. [0]

How is that hard? Got 100% correct on my 100% guesses. 70% correct on my 60-70% guesses and about 50% on the 50% ones. Don't people do this naturally? It is so easy to know when you are sure, when you know it is probably right and when you have no idea at all.

jimkleiber5• 5 years ago

You've never been sure of something only to find out you weren't correct on it?

I think I generally have a sense of how confident I am and yet I know I sometimes overshoot because I'm overlooking a detail or incorrectly remembering something.

crabmusket• 5 years ago

Do you write down your guesses, confidence levels and revisit these when something changes or comes to light? I'm genuinely curious how you keep track of this and how it fits into your day.

EDIT: oh I think I missed that this was specifically referring to the link. I read it as a general comment about calibrating confidence through one's life!

jimkleiber5• 5 years ago

Wow, I had a lot of fun with that link. Especially seeing the ones I got wrong with high confidence. Love it, thanks for sharing.

kazinator• 5 years ago

I.e. what this is referring to as "combating disinformation" is just within yourself, by means of adopting humility.

If you have humility (accepting the possibility that you are fallible and wrong), you are less susceptible to be fooled by disinformation that is based on appealing to the naive individual's sense of infallibility.

It does not speak to "combating disinformation" as in actually duking it out against disinformants, and winning, so that the objective quantity of disinformation in the world is diminished.

There, humility won't help you very much. The bad actors can simulate humility. In fact that is one common strategy. Spreaders of misinformation typically claim that they are rational, unbiased and willing to be wrong---in contrast of whatever they speak against.

A common pattern argument used by disiformants, for instance in this recent area of Covid-19 vaccines, is that science is arrogant and self-assured of its own infallibility (in effect, that science lacks humility). A good proportion of the masses is taken in by this, because, why, in fact, the way that the public officials have been behaving does in fact exhibit a lack of humility: they just assert they are right based on what the science is telling them this week, and then tell people what they can and cannot do, or must do.

("Science is arrogant and self-assured, lacking humility" is nothing new; for instance, it's a staple of the creationist argument against evolution.)

bulatb2• 5 years ago

Ideologies carve epistemic valleys. Cozy, beautiful places you'll never escape—because why would you try? No evidence from other places ever filters in.

Are you living in a valley? Maybe not. But what makes a valley, and how big can it be?

Are those mountains in the distance?

You can spend your whole life walking through horizons to be sure that, so far, no, you haven't been trapped. Most people just have better things to do.

chasil5• 5 years ago

Let me cut this foolish conjecture short.

The seven deadly sins:

Pride, wrath, sloth, lust, greed, envy, and gluttony.

The seven cardinal virtues:

Humility, meekness, zeal, chastity, generosity, charity, and temperance.

These were laws, but these are now suggestions, and touchstones.

I leave them before you as your tools.

bulatb2• 5 years ago

I don't understand.

I personally try to walk, because that's just what I prefer, but I can see why people don't. You end up far away from everything, without a tribe or much to show for your trouble.

Often times the truth is not what matters.

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

Zeal brought us witch trials and temperance brought us War on Drugs.

Getting high on your virtue is a bad thing.

HPsquared• 5 years ago

These are the "seven capital virtues" which are coupled to the seven deadly sins.

The cardinal virtues are different: there are four Cardinal virtues which come from classical philosophy (Wisdom, Courage, Justice, Moderation) and three theological virtues associated with Christianity (Faith, Hope, Charity). This set of seven is known as the heavenly virtues. These are a pretty good guideline in life, I find.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_virtues

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics

stareatgoats• 5 years ago

Most people just have better things to do.

Most people don't want to be called 'fools' either. Walking through horizons is a risky thing, you may lose your footing any time. But the reward is great, when you return down and can credibly convince the valley people that they are fools to miss out on the beautiful meetings that take place on mountaintops.

optimalsolver• 5 years ago

Plato’s Allegory Of The Valley.

lawrenceyan• 5 years ago

Can anyone help decipher the ending quote here?

It is easy to wake up a person who is sleeping but it’s hard to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.

At least to me, it doesn't seem to mesh all that well with what he wrote in the overall article, but maybe I'm missing something?

nverno• 5 years ago

People will ignore new information when they've already made up their minds or are too attached to their own reality (pretend sleeping), but can easily change their minds if they accept/are aware of their ignorance (sleeping).

The use of "wake" here also implies an intention to /convince/ the sleepers of something, which doesn't really jibe with the rest of the article for me, where he equates humility with lack of desire for validation, but I think it could be interpreted more passively as well, eg. enlighten.

high_52• 5 years ago

Have you ever tried to wake up a sleepwalking person?

beachy• 5 years ago

This doesn't quite sit right to me.

.. the individual would never have qualms about subjecting his beliefs or observations to open scrutiny and even discard it entirely in case enough facts and evidence are presented in its disfavor.

The best engineer types I have worked with are highly intelligent, and although they would certainly fight their corner ferociously, they are also capable of recognising when they are wrong - they almost delight in it. Like "ha ha, you got me!"

But I would never describe them as humble.

tomrod6• 5 years ago

Humility == teachability

Jensson8• 5 years ago

In my experience humility is the main thing that makes it hard to teach people. "Why is it important that I learn this, I'm not going to change the world? I just want to learn what I need to know to get by.", thought patterns along those lines is so common everywhere, at work, at school etc. People who think they matter are so much easier to teach, and those who go even further and want to change the world often don't need teaching since they learn it on their own.

Jensson8• 5 years ago

How would this work? Your leader tells you that vaccines are bad, you are humble so you trust your leader. Outsiders tells you that your leader is wrong, but you are humble so you don't think much about it, others are smarter than you and have thought this through so surely your leader can't be that wrong, so why not trust him?

Humble people don't value themselves and instead refer to authority. That lets misinformation spread since there will always be a lot of badly informed leaders around. The only way to fix that is to stop being humble, start distrusting your leaders and make your own judgements. But of course that would mean some people make the wrong judgement and will still be wrong, but at least since they made their own judgements they can be reasoned with unlike the humble people who never thought about it properly in the first place.

crooked-v• 5 years ago

at least since they made their own judgements they can be reasoned with

You've made the mistaken assumption here that the people making their own judgments must be using reason to do so.

Jensson8• 5 years ago

I am not convinced that there actually are a lot of such people you described. I think the people you meet who are hard to argue with are that way since they just listen to authority and repeats what their authority source told them. A naïve take would be that the person is arrogant and doesn't listen since he trusts himself too much, but in this case the problem is that the person is too humble and listened too much to his leader instead of thinking for himself in this argument.

jimkleiber5• 5 years ago

I simultaneously enjoyed the perspective the author brought about humility and felt confused at the certainty with which the author seemed to speak about this perspective. Maybe I've come to place too much emphasis on linguistic qualifications, such as maybe, might, possibly, I'm not sure, etc. Perhaps this theory is more along the lines of that saying about having strong beliefs but held weakly. I suppose I just miss an admission in the essay that says that although the author may strongly believe this, it may also not be true.

JacksonGariety• 5 years ago

Corporates, Business Rivals, Nation-States, and Criminal Organizations alike want to influence their target crowd in one way or another to achieve a diverse set of strategic objectives. And they absolutely do not hesitate to employ the means of Disinformation.
Be it the denigration of Covid vaccines or promotion of a particular election candidate, we have seen the usage of Disinformation time and time again...

Pretty ironic. Wouldn't business and government want to encourage people to get vaccines? It gives them an enormous amount of leverage over the herd. They'll use disinformation to make vaccines seem safer and more effective than they really are, in order to secure universal compliance from the masses. If you control people's immune systems, you win.

lotsofpulp7• 5 years ago

If you control people's immune systems, you win.

I appreciate “them” winning against polio, pertussis, measles, chickenpox, shingles, etc.

mewpmewp24• 5 years ago

I absolutely appreciate anyone who worked to win against these diseases as well. I think vaccines are an amazing invention by humankind. What I don't appreciate is how modern corporations like Pfizer are working in combination with likes of FDA, spreading misinformation themselves by covering up side effects and by doing so giving a completely wrong impression of what the risk, rewards of this vaccine are as well as leaving anyone vaccine injured behind, gaslighted by the whole society. And I'd still suggest these vaccines at the very least to risk groups. I don't know about other groups, because I can't trust their data.

Source - testimony from a trial participant's mother:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepqvdXoA2E&t=7130s

I'd suggest to watch the whole 3 hours though.

Source 2:

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

Kosirich• 5 years ago

It's simple actually... normalize, praise, celebrate and reward uttering the sentence (admitting) "I was wrong" or "I made a mistake".

Do it on a daily basis, do it with your family, friends, colleagues, but mostly do it yourself.

avblp• 5 years ago

This misses the point. The issue is that people do not trust governments after two stock market bubbles, quantitative easing scams, insider trading by politicians, CRT and deconstructing children's identities in schools, gain of function lies etc.

I've seen very little attempts at unbiased science. We'll see in the winter in Europe/North America if the vaccine actually works as advertised.

prohobo• 5 years ago

This article has a pretty interesting perspective, and I like the idea of humility as a precursor to being open-minded and engaging in critical thought. The art of debate requires at least someone involved being open to changing their mind.

But I see a couple problems with this article:

1) Psychology and cognitive science, as they currently stand, are mostly guess-work and observations. We don't know enough to make concrete diagnosis or prescribe solutions in such a steadfast manner, unless we're happy with possibly inflicting more damage (which we often do). Intellectualizing distrust by claiming it's because of a lack of humility and the mechanisms of ontological security seems a bit much. Why not approach combatting disinformation by becoming trustworthy?

2) The author conflates conflicting narratives with disinformation. How do they know what's true? Did they figure it out themselves or did they listen to a specific narrative? Why should anyone trust their opinion?

pietrovismara• 5 years ago

Those who are not humble have a compulsive need to attach themselves to and protect their ideals and beliefs. However, in doing so, they are ultimately protecting themselves. Once their beliefs are challenged, they mistake it as an attack upon themselves. Their ideas are tightly coupled with their self and its infallibility. Therefore, they become aggressive whenever a fact that runs counter to their beliefs is presented.

This could be the textbook description of the average commenter on HN's threads debating the merits of capitalism.

ggg23456782• 5 years ago

The problem is not what people choose to believe and it does not matter if what people believe is correct or not, until someone want them to do something that they would normally not do, such as support war or inject some substance in the body.

If someone has a very specific agenda and wants people do something specific, such as yes to vaccinate, instead of no to vaccinate, then what people believe becomes a problem.

The one with the specific agenda calls information that does not lead the wished specific action, disinformation and it is willing allocates resources to combat a war against that. This is easier and cheaper if the resources allocated really believe into that specific agenda themselves. Those that control education and have more presence in the media and in the social platforms have better cards.

This is propaganda in the making no matter what is the true direction. The reality is more complex that a simple truth that someone combatting for it can reveal to rest of us by being humble like Buddha. These are techniques used in advertising and politics to manipulate consent.

blueyes• 5 years ago

Does humility scale?

Combating disinformation with humility

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