"the degree to which our beliefs are not direct reflections of reality but are heavily mediated by vast, complex chains of trust and testimony is highly counter-intuitive. " That is probably the key point. A person asymmetrically is certain that he worked out his beliefs on his own, but other people don't know how to think for themselves.
For my money, Dan Williams understands political psychology and epistemology better than anyone else in the world (that I know of). This is manifestly true. One can directly perceive the truthiness of what he writes.
Thank you for this. Your incisive philosophical dissection of the shortcomings in the field of misinformation research sheds light on a deeper issue—one that extends far beyond this specific domain. I fear it reflects a widespread problem within the social and educational sciences, particularly those aimed at informing policy on timely issues.
Many of these disciplines, ostensibly designed to tackle pressing societal challenges, seem to have become entangled in a troubling dynamic. Subsidized to demonstrate "societal relevance," they often risk devolving into vehicles for confirming political biases. National funding channels that prioritize immediate relevance can inadvertently incentivize research agendas aligned with prevailing political narratives. This creates an environment where science is subtly co-opted, not necessarily by overt censorship or manipulation, but through the structural pressures of funding priorities. Is this not, in essence, a form of conflict of interest?
One might describe this as a tacit alignment between political expediency and academic research—what could almost be called knee-jerk politics cloaked in the veneer of scientific legitimacy. This alignment, I fear, fosters a parallel phenomenon of knee-jerk science: studies designed to serve immediate political or social agendas rather than pursuing deeper, as unbiased as feasible, inquiry.
To raise such concerns, however, risks being dismissed as a nuisance - or worse, say, a postmodernist. But this dismissal misses the point. It is not a matter of accusing researchers or policymakers of malice, but of recognizing the systemic pressures that distort both the questions we ask and the answers we find.
Misinformation research, then, serves as a case study of this broader crisis. Its flaws do not merely reflect the limits of the field, but also highlight how easily research can be shaped by political and social imperatives. By critically examining these dynamics, we not only improve the integrity of misinformation research but also open the door to addressing the systemic issues that compromise scientific inquiry across disciplines. This requires courage: to ask uncomfortable questions, to resist convenient narratives, and to insist on science that serves knowledge rather than ideology.
Dan you shold spend less time posting frequent notes and articles and start writting a book.You are a young guy,in 10-20 years you will have gained more prestige and money with less time consumed. You went from 2k to 10k in like a year here,and every smart person is reading you already. You are probably gonna make it work. Besides a public intelectual without a book is like a burger without meat(or tofu for vegans). I would at least by a copy
This is an example of misinformation ;). The odds are overwhelming that a book will sink without a trace. At least here, a lot of people, like me, will pay attention to your ideas and be able to amplify them.
I suspect "sink like a rock" would still be at least ten times the readers.
I often wonder how much I retain from what I read on substack. I tend to think it is less than from books. And I more strongly expect that after a year, the substack posts will be less visible than the book.
I think this is a tough call. Books still have more prestige, and bestow authority - especially with a segment of society that most needs to hear what Dan's saying. But substack is a far superior channel for disseminating ideas, especially if you want people to actually engage them. (With the rare exception of arguments that actually require a book-length treatment to develop them.)
I just asked Perplexity AI search engine 'what is PoS', and it failed, even though it correctly distinguished PofS from POFs and POFS; then I added Dan William's name, and it came up with Philosophy of Science.
According to my nephew, who has had 3 well distributed, nicely sold numbers, and reviewed in leading publiciations including a full page in the Sunday NY Times, a full page in the WSJ, and 5 pages in the NY'er by Gopnik...books are nowadays sinking without a trace.
The entire publishing world is upended, agents aren't sure where to go or what to do, and people are now ignoring all previous learned recommendations on books in favor of someone on Tiktok that no one in this generation has ever heard of and who's got 150 billion followers.
Publishing nowadays is not what we imagine. It's messed up.
This argument reminds me of Herbert Simon’s woefully under-appreciated notion of Bounded Rationality. It describes the limitations of human decision-making and suggests that individuals cannot fully optimize decisions but are instead significantly constrained by cognitive limitations, limited information, time constraints and satisficing. All these factors, of which cognitive bias is certainly one, unavoidably keyhole reality, limit our perception and hamstring our rationality in areas like politics, economics, etc.
At first, it seemed bizarre to me that anyone would call you a postmodernist...
But I can see how van der Linden would make that mistake. Although you are not a pomo , it is easy to make a pomo, anti-realistic critique of misinfo research. From the pomo perspective, misinformation research is pointless b/c it relies on the belief in objective truth, but there is no such thing. Claims of objectivity are simply a power play in a game of influence and social control. Thus, for pomos, whatever misinfo researchers say they are doing, they are actually trying to accumulate social power by establishing their own political biases as neutral truth claims.
With all due respect to your analysis, which makes more sense to me, I think that the pomo critique of misinfo research is more popular and influential in our woke era. Since Trump got elected, I constantly hear journalists like Nicole Hannah Jones tell me that objectivity is a myth. So, maybe that's why van der Linden lumps you in with the pomos, whose ideas are more salient these days.
And Lippmann too -- I haven't read him myself, but I've heard him described as an anti-realist who rejects the idea of objectivity.
So, commenting on my own comment ... I think that I'm trying to say that van der Linden is not a "naive naive realist" but an "anti anti-foundationalist." He's clinging desperately to his own perception of reality not b/c he has failed to recognize that there are alternatives but b/c he fears that he'll drown in the ocean of relativism and skepticism if he lets go.
" the pomo critique of misinfo research is more popular"
Think this is on target.
Unfortunately, as fewer people are able to digest the frontiers of science & sheer info volume, disbelief in the idea of a shared reference to a truth will grow.
The enlightenment is over, now the loudest voice, & 'superstition', is the way, to gainsay Stevie Wonder.
The unavoidableness of political bias is exactly why there are political facts. You say we are immersed in history, but placing a ban on identifying and proselytizing facts itself assumes a neutral, disembodied “scientific” position, it’s just one that uses its supposed neutrality to prohibit identification of facts (since they are “biased”) instead of prescribing them.
When I say that such-and-such as a fact, I am doing so with the full knowledge that my model of the world is deeply conditioned and that it is impossible for facts to be truly self-evident. Nevertheless, from my perspective they truly appear to be self-evident, and that is the best you can ever say about something. Yes, the world is round. Fact. Yes, Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Fact. Can I prove it to you? Maybe not, if you are a radical skeptic or have different political biases. But the fact - and that is also a fact - that I have political bias of my own does not mean that I’m wrong, that these are indeed facts. It just means that I cannot step outside of my own head and prove it to everyone beyond a reasonable doubt. But if I could, then you would see that it is indeed true, that’s how confident I am in my model of the world at least on these most basic of questions. So I’m going to call it fact, and for all intents and purposes treat it as one, and if I were a “neutral” political researcher I would operate on the assumption that flat earther and election denialism are indeed misinformation, because they go against what are obviously the facts from my perspective, and if you disagree with that then that can only be from your perspective.
"When I say that such-and-such as a fact, I am doing so with the full knowledge that my model of the world is deeply conditioned and that it is impossible for facts to be truly self-evident."
I'm not sure which world you live in... but (all nice philosophical/biological twists aside) most perceptual facts are, most of the time, self-evident. eg. I am typing on a laptop - it is not a camel. Additionally, statements (knowledge claims) about the world and about political beliefs/judgments should not be conflated - they are different in kind.
I think there is a relevant difference between immediate perceptual facts of my experience and mediated facts where I have to trust the judgement of others, e.g. that votes in an election were counted correctly. It is fair to say that it is truly evident I am typing on my phone and not a camel. It is not really self evident than anyone won any particular election, it only appears to be obvious from my perspective because my model of the world places trust that the votes were counted correctly, and if they weren’t then there would be more substantial complaints for example. This as I understand it is a knowledge claim about the world, not a political judgement because I could have any number of political beliefs and still believe it is a fact that Biden won. If it isn’t self evident then at least I believe it would be evident to anyone who seriously investigated it, that’s what makes it a fact according to my model of the world. Perhaps that isn’t literally true because someone with different political beliefs would come to different conclusions, but there are certain epistemic norms being invoked that rule out those conclusions as bad faith or mistaken.
Touching on the distinction between the existence of facts and our access to those facts, some of your critics appear to believe in the myth of “unfiltered truth”. They do not acknowledge or understand that even when our propositions correspond with reality (i.e we represent the world as it is), the truth has passed through a filter - because we are the filter.
Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you will remain a pawn in someone else's game --Evita Ochel
The media - both news and entertainment - have now politicized nearly everything in our society as an extremely powerful mechanism of control.
Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas. This is why Republican vs Democrat equals divide and conquer (we fight amongst ourselves while they decimate our support systems and establish totalitarian control). The human mind is binary. Our thought process can often be boiled down into terms (often ultimatums) of – this or that – and our adversaries understand - very well - the art of this war.
(Instead of you taking control of the system or working to prepare for the worst (growing a garden, digging a well, strengthening your community, gathering supplies, and becoming resilient) you hold out hope for a politician to sweep in and solve your problems for you. There is only one place this lack of action can take us. Power corrupts and Washington DC is as corrupt as they come.)
They know that politicization (pitting us at each other throats regardless of relationship status - neighbor, co-worker, friend, family) is so effective at manipulating us because most emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences.
It would be useful to do a deeper dive into a ranking of interpretations of a particular event. Is there any epistemological place to stand when making the assertion that one interpretation is better than another?
Good, comprehensive, nuanced analysis, as usual. We don't see the world "as is", but as reflected through our eyes and, beyond that, largely as conveyed by the reports of trusted sources--a vicious or virtuous or middling circle, depending. Great to see Walter Lippman quoted at length in an essay on political perception. As for motivated reasoning, I'm reminded of a debate in the analysis of error in foreign policy; that is, whether strategic mistakes arise as a result of flawed intelligence or flawed policy. Turns out it is difficult to pry the two apart. Perception is forged and framed by the end goal -- and that we see what we "need" to see for the activity in question. Intelligence and policy are in a similar problematic relationship. Because sometimes we think we're doing one thing, and we're doing another. To take a baseball analogy (which I know you Brits love), sometimes the center fielder smashes into the center field wall and dislocates his shoulder because he "wasn't paying attention." But I know you know that. Keep em coming.
it’s doubtful that misinformation researchers—or anyone else—can achieve the degree of objectivity required to reliably and impartially identify which information satisfies the definition.
One may reserve 'misinformation' for incorrect statements, and 'disinformation' for intentionally incorrect statements. My view, also is that there is a (quite complex) reality, and I'm constantly amazed at how much of it is becoming known!
In this usage, though, one of the 'uses of the idea of 'misinformation' is to distinguish (thought to be) incorrect statements from what is (thought to be) true, and what is (thought to be) intentionally false. These are understood to communicate statements of one's thoughts - UNLESS one is lying (about lying, etc.).
However if one denies the existence of the possibility of a gradual approximation to some mutually acknowledged truth over time, what's the point of speech / blogging - besides control & dominion?
"if one denies the existence of the possibility of a gradual approximation to some mutually acknowledged truth over time, what's the point of speech / blogging - besides control & dominion?"
Adversarial parties are generally not cooperating in an effort to approximate truth, but they belong to interpretive communities that are doing so, within those communities themselves.
This was another interesting read – as usual with your posts. It’s interesting to see these academic debates about misinformation becoming “politicised” (or maybe “contested” remains the appropriate term for now).
Just continuing with Lippmann, I'm curious about your views on his work. The employment of Lippmann’s The Phantom Public in the context of bias in politics is nicely done here and touches on the core elements of this book. The Phantom Public is, in terms of its epistemological and metaphysical commitments, much more nuanced than Public Opinion - where Lippmann had said that “experts” can ‘break through the stereotypes’ (p. 369). Still, I wonder what you think of Lippmann’s focus on “insiders” in The Phantom Public. Citing Robert Michel’s Political Parties in both Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, Lippmann seemed to have understood the “insiders” as something like the heads of administrative public life (e.g., directors of the railroad companies). They seemed to have, according to Lippmann, an accurate picture of their environment - hence, why Lippmann proposed a decentralised constellation of governance (those closest to the affairs – but always those at the head of public administration – should attend to the particular problem). How do you view these Lippmannian “insiders” in relation to the ‘deep pluralism' and biased opinion that Lippmann very much seemed to have acknowledged in The Phantom Public?
This is a really great question. I'm still thinking about this topic, to be honest, and don't have considered views. Re-reading Lippmann recently, I'm struck by the fact that the critical part of his writings is much more persuasive than the constructive, positive side.
What I find fascinating is that all of this framing and analysis seems inexorably drawn to facts - is this *thing* true/false/intentional/… Even the excellent Lippmann quote is essentially focusing on the availability of perception of facts, and whether the mediation by another observer changes their status.
Clearly, the mind creates maps, and these maps don’t match the ground, both because we have never experienced most pieces of ground (metaphorically speaking), because the information in a piece of ground exceeds perceptive and cognitive capacity, and because map-making is inherently coarse-grained and reductive. Thus we make our own little maps, and mine shows the Netherlands with little icon of a windmill and another’s shows Hitler’s advance.
The question is the degree to which we can introspect, evaluate or simply improve our map-making. It is the process not the map. People with simplistic biases are usually people who are drawing their maps with crayon on a broken piece of concrete toilet.
Propaganda is not a set of facts, it is a method of training. When someone has “deep-seated” biases, it is not that their fact representation has some fantastical root system to blame for its tenacity, it is the absence of the ability to draw/redraw. It is fixed in the way a rock is fixed in a landscape nobody ever inhabits. It could be moved, but there is no mover.
There are better and worse minds for smoking out misinformation. But these minds are not characterized by their set of facts or the root systems of their fact graphs, it is by the sophistication of the pattern-matching.
Foolish and gullible people not only have simple fact patterns, they have not developed adequately sophisticated, deep, intuitive models. Because they haven’t read much or well, because they don’t interact with people and cultures that are fully realized yet distinct, because they never developed the ability to see two “opposite” facts as simultaneously correct, they cannot evaluate their own map. And this map wants desperately to be right, so it will always be prey.
I love the discussion of postmodern thinking, though I (probably like you) find it epically silly. There is a world out there (whether it is a simulation or not is epistemically uninteresting - realness should not depend on substrate, just coherence), and we do mediate it through interpretation. It is simultaneously the source of truth and unreliable. Trying to divide the world into “Truth is what is directly observable” and “there is no Truth” is sophomoric.
"Foolish and gullible people not only have simple fact patterns, they have not developed adequately sophisticated, deep, intuitive models. Because they haven’t read much or well,..."
We are here talking about the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and who are alive today.
"the degree to which our beliefs are not direct reflections of reality but are heavily mediated by vast, complex chains of trust and testimony is highly counter-intuitive. " That is probably the key point. A person asymmetrically is certain that he worked out his beliefs on his own, but other people don't know how to think for themselves.
For my money, Dan Williams understands political psychology and epistemology better than anyone else in the world (that I know of). This is manifestly true. One can directly perceive the truthiness of what he writes.
"...(that I know of)."
I see what you did there.
Myself and some of his other blog subscribers pay him for writing here.
You present a case that he should be paying you.
Haha the man is legitimately a legend though. Really excellent ideas.
Ha - thanks
Thank you for this. Your incisive philosophical dissection of the shortcomings in the field of misinformation research sheds light on a deeper issue—one that extends far beyond this specific domain. I fear it reflects a widespread problem within the social and educational sciences, particularly those aimed at informing policy on timely issues.
Many of these disciplines, ostensibly designed to tackle pressing societal challenges, seem to have become entangled in a troubling dynamic. Subsidized to demonstrate "societal relevance," they often risk devolving into vehicles for confirming political biases. National funding channels that prioritize immediate relevance can inadvertently incentivize research agendas aligned with prevailing political narratives. This creates an environment where science is subtly co-opted, not necessarily by overt censorship or manipulation, but through the structural pressures of funding priorities. Is this not, in essence, a form of conflict of interest?
One might describe this as a tacit alignment between political expediency and academic research—what could almost be called knee-jerk politics cloaked in the veneer of scientific legitimacy. This alignment, I fear, fosters a parallel phenomenon of knee-jerk science: studies designed to serve immediate political or social agendas rather than pursuing deeper, as unbiased as feasible, inquiry.
To raise such concerns, however, risks being dismissed as a nuisance - or worse, say, a postmodernist. But this dismissal misses the point. It is not a matter of accusing researchers or policymakers of malice, but of recognizing the systemic pressures that distort both the questions we ask and the answers we find.
Misinformation research, then, serves as a case study of this broader crisis. Its flaws do not merely reflect the limits of the field, but also highlight how easily research can be shaped by political and social imperatives. By critically examining these dynamics, we not only improve the integrity of misinformation research but also open the door to addressing the systemic issues that compromise scientific inquiry across disciplines. This requires courage: to ask uncomfortable questions, to resist convenient narratives, and to insist on science that serves knowledge rather than ideology.
Great comment! Very insightful.
Dan you shold spend less time posting frequent notes and articles and start writting a book.You are a young guy,in 10-20 years you will have gained more prestige and money with less time consumed. You went from 2k to 10k in like a year here,and every smart person is reading you already. You are probably gonna make it work. Besides a public intelectual without a book is like a burger without meat(or tofu for vegans). I would at least by a copy
This is an example of misinformation ;). The odds are overwhelming that a book will sink without a trace. At least here, a lot of people, like me, will pay attention to your ideas and be able to amplify them.
I don't think my opinions and predictions as a non-journalist would clasiffy as misinformation :)
Indeed, and agreed.
I suspect "sink like a rock" would still be at least ten times the readers.
I often wonder how much I retain from what I read on substack. I tend to think it is less than from books. And I more strongly expect that after a year, the substack posts will be less visible than the book.
Thanks - I do plan to write a popular book on these topics but I've got a couple of academic ones I'm trying to finish up first.
I think this is a tough call. Books still have more prestige, and bestow authority - especially with a segment of society that most needs to hear what Dan's saying. But substack is a far superior channel for disseminating ideas, especially if you want people to actually engage them. (With the rare exception of arguments that actually require a book-length treatment to develop them.)
Only AI's read books, going forward.
I just asked Perplexity AI search engine 'what is PoS', and it failed, even though it correctly distinguished PofS from POFs and POFS; then I added Dan William's name, and it came up with Philosophy of Science.
According to my nephew, who has had 3 well distributed, nicely sold numbers, and reviewed in leading publiciations including a full page in the Sunday NY Times, a full page in the WSJ, and 5 pages in the NY'er by Gopnik...books are nowadays sinking without a trace.
The entire publishing world is upended, agents aren't sure where to go or what to do, and people are now ignoring all previous learned recommendations on books in favor of someone on Tiktok that no one in this generation has ever heard of and who's got 150 billion followers.
Publishing nowadays is not what we imagine. It's messed up.
I would buy too.
Put me down for a copy
This argument reminds me of Herbert Simon’s woefully under-appreciated notion of Bounded Rationality. It describes the limitations of human decision-making and suggests that individuals cannot fully optimize decisions but are instead significantly constrained by cognitive limitations, limited information, time constraints and satisficing. All these factors, of which cognitive bias is certainly one, unavoidably keyhole reality, limit our perception and hamstring our rationality in areas like politics, economics, etc.
At first, it seemed bizarre to me that anyone would call you a postmodernist...
But I can see how van der Linden would make that mistake. Although you are not a pomo , it is easy to make a pomo, anti-realistic critique of misinfo research. From the pomo perspective, misinformation research is pointless b/c it relies on the belief in objective truth, but there is no such thing. Claims of objectivity are simply a power play in a game of influence and social control. Thus, for pomos, whatever misinfo researchers say they are doing, they are actually trying to accumulate social power by establishing their own political biases as neutral truth claims.
With all due respect to your analysis, which makes more sense to me, I think that the pomo critique of misinfo research is more popular and influential in our woke era. Since Trump got elected, I constantly hear journalists like Nicole Hannah Jones tell me that objectivity is a myth. So, maybe that's why van der Linden lumps you in with the pomos, whose ideas are more salient these days.
And Lippmann too -- I haven't read him myself, but I've heard him described as an anti-realist who rejects the idea of objectivity.
So, commenting on my own comment ... I think that I'm trying to say that van der Linden is not a "naive naive realist" but an "anti anti-foundationalist." He's clinging desperately to his own perception of reality not b/c he has failed to recognize that there are alternatives but b/c he fears that he'll drown in the ocean of relativism and skepticism if he lets go.
" the pomo critique of misinfo research is more popular"
Think this is on target.
Unfortunately, as fewer people are able to digest the frontiers of science & sheer info volume, disbelief in the idea of a shared reference to a truth will grow.
The enlightenment is over, now the loudest voice, & 'superstition', is the way, to gainsay Stevie Wonder.
Interesting - thanks. I think that's a misrepresentation of Lippmann based on my reading.
The unavoidableness of political bias is exactly why there are political facts. You say we are immersed in history, but placing a ban on identifying and proselytizing facts itself assumes a neutral, disembodied “scientific” position, it’s just one that uses its supposed neutrality to prohibit identification of facts (since they are “biased”) instead of prescribing them.
When I say that such-and-such as a fact, I am doing so with the full knowledge that my model of the world is deeply conditioned and that it is impossible for facts to be truly self-evident. Nevertheless, from my perspective they truly appear to be self-evident, and that is the best you can ever say about something. Yes, the world is round. Fact. Yes, Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Fact. Can I prove it to you? Maybe not, if you are a radical skeptic or have different political biases. But the fact - and that is also a fact - that I have political bias of my own does not mean that I’m wrong, that these are indeed facts. It just means that I cannot step outside of my own head and prove it to everyone beyond a reasonable doubt. But if I could, then you would see that it is indeed true, that’s how confident I am in my model of the world at least on these most basic of questions. So I’m going to call it fact, and for all intents and purposes treat it as one, and if I were a “neutral” political researcher I would operate on the assumption that flat earther and election denialism are indeed misinformation, because they go against what are obviously the facts from my perspective, and if you disagree with that then that can only be from your perspective.
Fair points
"When I say that such-and-such as a fact, I am doing so with the full knowledge that my model of the world is deeply conditioned and that it is impossible for facts to be truly self-evident."
I'm not sure which world you live in... but (all nice philosophical/biological twists aside) most perceptual facts are, most of the time, self-evident. eg. I am typing on a laptop - it is not a camel. Additionally, statements (knowledge claims) about the world and about political beliefs/judgments should not be conflated - they are different in kind.
I think there is a relevant difference between immediate perceptual facts of my experience and mediated facts where I have to trust the judgement of others, e.g. that votes in an election were counted correctly. It is fair to say that it is truly evident I am typing on my phone and not a camel. It is not really self evident than anyone won any particular election, it only appears to be obvious from my perspective because my model of the world places trust that the votes were counted correctly, and if they weren’t then there would be more substantial complaints for example. This as I understand it is a knowledge claim about the world, not a political judgement because I could have any number of political beliefs and still believe it is a fact that Biden won. If it isn’t self evident then at least I believe it would be evident to anyone who seriously investigated it, that’s what makes it a fact according to my model of the world. Perhaps that isn’t literally true because someone with different political beliefs would come to different conclusions, but there are certain epistemic norms being invoked that rule out those conclusions as bad faith or mistaken.
Touching on the distinction between the existence of facts and our access to those facts, some of your critics appear to believe in the myth of “unfiltered truth”. They do not acknowledge or understand that even when our propositions correspond with reality (i.e we represent the world as it is), the truth has passed through a filter - because we are the filter.
Yes exactly - related to what Wilfrid Sellars called the "myth of the given"
And Kant called "the synthetic unity of apperception."
Nice essay and caused me to review my reading on polarisation of belief. Thank you.
*and Naturalism for that matter! Now have quite a lot to read!
Thanks
Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you will remain a pawn in someone else's game --Evita Ochel
The media - both news and entertainment - have now politicized nearly everything in our society as an extremely powerful mechanism of control.
Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas. This is why Republican vs Democrat equals divide and conquer (we fight amongst ourselves while they decimate our support systems and establish totalitarian control). The human mind is binary. Our thought process can often be boiled down into terms (often ultimatums) of – this or that – and our adversaries understand - very well - the art of this war.
(Instead of you taking control of the system or working to prepare for the worst (growing a garden, digging a well, strengthening your community, gathering supplies, and becoming resilient) you hold out hope for a politician to sweep in and solve your problems for you. There is only one place this lack of action can take us. Power corrupts and Washington DC is as corrupt as they come.)
They know that politicization (pitting us at each other throats regardless of relationship status - neighbor, co-worker, friend, family) is so effective at manipulating us because most emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences.
Excerpt from https://tritorch.com/folly
It would be useful to do a deeper dive into a ranking of interpretations of a particular event. Is there any epistemological place to stand when making the assertion that one interpretation is better than another?
Good question - am returning to this issue in a future post.
For me “hard to vary explanations” (Popper refined by Deutsch) is the way out. But curious to hear your views.
Good, comprehensive, nuanced analysis, as usual. We don't see the world "as is", but as reflected through our eyes and, beyond that, largely as conveyed by the reports of trusted sources--a vicious or virtuous or middling circle, depending. Great to see Walter Lippman quoted at length in an essay on political perception. As for motivated reasoning, I'm reminded of a debate in the analysis of error in foreign policy; that is, whether strategic mistakes arise as a result of flawed intelligence or flawed policy. Turns out it is difficult to pry the two apart. Perception is forged and framed by the end goal -- and that we see what we "need" to see for the activity in question. Intelligence and policy are in a similar problematic relationship. Because sometimes we think we're doing one thing, and we're doing another. To take a baseball analogy (which I know you Brits love), sometimes the center fielder smashes into the center field wall and dislocates his shoulder because he "wasn't paying attention." But I know you know that. Keep em coming.
Thanks - good summary and comment. Had to look up what a center fielder is though...
If, as you say,:
it’s doubtful that misinformation researchers—or anyone else—can achieve the degree of objectivity required to reliably and impartially identify which information satisfies the definition.
Then if what use is the idea of misinformation?
One may reserve 'misinformation' for incorrect statements, and 'disinformation' for intentionally incorrect statements. My view, also is that there is a (quite complex) reality, and I'm constantly amazed at how much of it is becoming known!
In this usage, though, one of the 'uses of the idea of 'misinformation' is to distinguish (thought to be) incorrect statements from what is (thought to be) true, and what is (thought to be) intentionally false. These are understood to communicate statements of one's thoughts - UNLESS one is lying (about lying, etc.).
However if one denies the existence of the possibility of a gradual approximation to some mutually acknowledged truth over time, what's the point of speech / blogging - besides control & dominion?
"if one denies the existence of the possibility of a gradual approximation to some mutually acknowledged truth over time, what's the point of speech / blogging - besides control & dominion?"
Adversarial parties are generally not cooperating in an effort to approximate truth, but they belong to interpretive communities that are doing so, within those communities themselves.
This was another interesting read – as usual with your posts. It’s interesting to see these academic debates about misinformation becoming “politicised” (or maybe “contested” remains the appropriate term for now).
Just continuing with Lippmann, I'm curious about your views on his work. The employment of Lippmann’s The Phantom Public in the context of bias in politics is nicely done here and touches on the core elements of this book. The Phantom Public is, in terms of its epistemological and metaphysical commitments, much more nuanced than Public Opinion - where Lippmann had said that “experts” can ‘break through the stereotypes’ (p. 369). Still, I wonder what you think of Lippmann’s focus on “insiders” in The Phantom Public. Citing Robert Michel’s Political Parties in both Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, Lippmann seemed to have understood the “insiders” as something like the heads of administrative public life (e.g., directors of the railroad companies). They seemed to have, according to Lippmann, an accurate picture of their environment - hence, why Lippmann proposed a decentralised constellation of governance (those closest to the affairs – but always those at the head of public administration – should attend to the particular problem). How do you view these Lippmannian “insiders” in relation to the ‘deep pluralism' and biased opinion that Lippmann very much seemed to have acknowledged in The Phantom Public?
This is a really great question. I'm still thinking about this topic, to be honest, and don't have considered views. Re-reading Lippmann recently, I'm struck by the fact that the critical part of his writings is much more persuasive than the constructive, positive side.
One can also come to the critically-informed & defensible conclusion that others are just plain misguided.
What I find fascinating is that all of this framing and analysis seems inexorably drawn to facts - is this *thing* true/false/intentional/… Even the excellent Lippmann quote is essentially focusing on the availability of perception of facts, and whether the mediation by another observer changes their status.
Clearly, the mind creates maps, and these maps don’t match the ground, both because we have never experienced most pieces of ground (metaphorically speaking), because the information in a piece of ground exceeds perceptive and cognitive capacity, and because map-making is inherently coarse-grained and reductive. Thus we make our own little maps, and mine shows the Netherlands with little icon of a windmill and another’s shows Hitler’s advance.
The question is the degree to which we can introspect, evaluate or simply improve our map-making. It is the process not the map. People with simplistic biases are usually people who are drawing their maps with crayon on a broken piece of concrete toilet.
Propaganda is not a set of facts, it is a method of training. When someone has “deep-seated” biases, it is not that their fact representation has some fantastical root system to blame for its tenacity, it is the absence of the ability to draw/redraw. It is fixed in the way a rock is fixed in a landscape nobody ever inhabits. It could be moved, but there is no mover.
There are better and worse minds for smoking out misinformation. But these minds are not characterized by their set of facts or the root systems of their fact graphs, it is by the sophistication of the pattern-matching.
Foolish and gullible people not only have simple fact patterns, they have not developed adequately sophisticated, deep, intuitive models. Because they haven’t read much or well, because they don’t interact with people and cultures that are fully realized yet distinct, because they never developed the ability to see two “opposite” facts as simultaneously correct, they cannot evaluate their own map. And this map wants desperately to be right, so it will always be prey.
I love the discussion of postmodern thinking, though I (probably like you) find it epically silly. There is a world out there (whether it is a simulation or not is epistemically uninteresting - realness should not depend on substrate, just coherence), and we do mediate it through interpretation. It is simultaneously the source of truth and unreliable. Trying to divide the world into “Truth is what is directly observable” and “there is no Truth” is sophomoric.
"Foolish and gullible people not only have simple fact patterns, they have not developed adequately sophisticated, deep, intuitive models. Because they haven’t read much or well,..."
We are here talking about the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and who are alive today.
Sad but likely true. Including many of our leaders left and right
It's sad if you happen to be off the post Enlightenment rationalist cast of mind
Otherwise
It just is and you embrace others who signal their membership of your tribe or you prepare to fight them
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