Facebook will start telling you when a story may be fake
Washington Post
Facebook has struggled for months over whether it should crack down on false news stories and hoaxes that are being spread on its site.
Washington Post |
Facebook has struggled for months over whether it should crack down on false news stories and hoaxes that are being spread on its site.
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Alan: Personally, I applaud Zuckerberg's effort to alert Facebook users to false news - or even the possibility that news may be bogus.
However, there are academics who have researched this matter and, surprisingly, they have changed their mind.
The data is quite persuasive: the refutation of false news causes "believers" to double down on their belief, making them more adamantly evangelical than before their stars were crossed.
Here is the hard truth.
People want to be lied to. (We're also quite adept lying to ourselves.)
The data is quite persuasive: the refutation of false news causes "believers" to double down on their belief, making them more adamantly evangelical than before their stars were crossed.
Here is the hard truth.
People want to be lied to. (We're also quite adept lying to ourselves.)
"The Death Of Epistemology"
Clearly, there is self-deception on both sides of the aisle. But at some point, quantitative accumulation of falsehood brings about a qualitative change.
Like water becoming a gas at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's still liquid at 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211.
Bingo!
Gas!
Those Americans who think Trump "tells it like is" are the very people most inclined to lie to themselves, people who have lied to themselves so long and so completely that they have lost the ability to register Truth.
"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating." Denis de Rougemont
Worse yet, those who have already denatured Truth are so absolutely self-certain of their rightness (and righteousness) that they cannot even entertain the possibility of being wrong without running the risk of losing their faith in "God."
Whatever backed them into that corner is downright diabolical.
"Plan B" for these folks is conspiracy thinking - just concoct any damn explanation for why the Sandy Hook slaughter was not real (like the fact that parents don't cry on camera) and then assert "make believe" as truth.
The Thinking Housewife Plunges Into The Abyss Of Conspiratorial Thinking
Alternatively, friend Byron likes to point out that "the nature of scientific pursuit obliges real researchers to try to prove themselves wrong."
Many are called. Few are chosen.
***
Those Americans who think Trump "tells it like is" are the very people most inclined to lie to themselves, people who have lied to themselves so long and so completely that they have lost the ability to register Truth.
"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating." Denis de Rougemont
Worse yet, those who have already denatured Truth are so absolutely self-certain of their rightness (and righteousness) that they cannot even entertain the possibility of being wrong without running the risk of losing their faith in "God."
Whatever backed them into that corner is downright diabolical.
"Plan B" for these folks is conspiracy thinking - just concoct any damn explanation for why the Sandy Hook slaughter was not real (like the fact that parents don't cry on camera) and then assert "make believe" as truth.
Whatever backed them into that corner is downright diabolical.
"Plan B" for these folks is conspiracy thinking - just concoct any damn explanation for why the Sandy Hook slaughter was not real (like the fact that parents don't cry on camera) and then assert "make believe" as truth.
The Thinking Housewife Plunges Into The Abyss Of Conspiratorial Thinking
Alternatively, friend Byron likes to point out that "the nature of scientific pursuit obliges real researchers to try to prove themselves wrong."
Many are called. Few are chosen.
Many are called. Few are chosen.
***
I suspect we are re-enacting "The Tower of Babel"
In that splendid story, "The People's One Language" was suddenly confused so that "the bewildered" found themselves no longer understanding one another, and -- lacking mutual understanding -- they could not work together; could not collaborate.
King Nimrod's people -- long settled in Shinar where they dedicated themselves to building The Tower -- were suddenly "scattered over the face of the earth."
"The scattering" resulting from "linguistic confusion" of The One Language -- a single tonque that previously insured everyone's "common understanding" -- now brought about self-segregation of Shinar's baffled sub-populations... a circumstance reminiscent of post-modern America's mutually-unintelligible political constituencies --- Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Trumpettes, Occupiers, Bernie-socialists and so on.
Consider.
Would any of us -- you or me -- understand "the language" spoken in Trump Tower?
If we were flies on the wall of his gold-plated bathroom, we would discover they speak babel.
What's more, the language of The Tower would not even be true to those who are speaking it! They've been lying so long, they don't know what's true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53JkTgdTKd0
"We" seem to be speaking the same language.
But suddenly -- starting with The National Lunacy unleashed when The Other Towers came crashing on 9/11) we fail to understand "the other tribes." Even though we huddle under the same linguistic umbrella: the semantic content of our words has become confused. (In my personal life, I find that the more precisely I speak, the more opaque I am to The Others.)
Certain groups no longer understand other groups, while a third category of linguo-semantic "tribes" partially understands other "tribes" but only insofar as speakers of related dialects "get the general drift" but are deprived of sufficient lexical nuance or complexity to realize projects "held in common."
As is always true of The Future, I cannot predict the specific outcomes of this confusion.
But I think this confusion will be the cornerstone of The American Empire's pending dissolution.
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