Aunt Marge now lives in the Whatsapp family chat.
Now instead of your aunt coming at you with misinfo she learned from her aunt, it’s your aunt coming at you with misinformation she learned from a russian bot farm.
But at least you can counter it with misinformation from an AI bot :D
I have the opposite problem. My mother doesn’t believe anything I tell her and thinks it is misinformation that I’ve been fed.
Have you ever tried to out crazy the crazy and force them to try to take the reasonable stance? It’s cathartic.
Yes and to make it even worse, your aunt back in the day would tell 10 people some BS and maybe 3 would believe her. Not some Russian bot factory spits out BS to 10 million people and a lot more believe it.
Did you spray for Russians under your bed before going to sleep? You really should, and check behind the sofa and in the dryer too. Russians can disguise themselves as Bounce dryer sheets, and the latest Russians can send themselves over Ethernet using the RoE protocol: Russian over Ethernet.
Russia! Quite an imaginary world you live in! Aunts and Russians and bots and misinformation and all these people targeting you! How exciting!
Can I send you my Moral Rearmament and John Birch Society fliers?
I’m oddly honored that I got a 3 paragraph troll with pictures in response to a comment that was barely even about russia.
“I don’t like what you say therefore you are a troll.” Classic shitlib behaviour.
GOOD point.
The well documented Russian troll networks simply do not exist.
Yep. The mark of a stupid Westerner is how much they blame Russia for their country’s problems (the exception being Ukraine obviously). Meanwhile the US literally has a billion+ dollar anti-China propaganda budget (taxpayer funded) and a decentralized, private network of pro-Israel propagandists backed by the richest people in the country, buying up entire media companies for that purpose.
And now instead of Marge, it’s ChatGPT.
It uses megawatts of electricity and is somehow wronger.
You’re grammar is the wrongerest.
*grandma
Also you’re an asshole for attacking his lineage.
/s
I have a gen-z friend who unjokingly does that. He’s like “I asked grok if it was true and it confirmed it.”
I wish at least he followed up with the logic or sources behind it… but no he was like “grok said so. I asked it.” he was dead serious. and I wanted to hit my head into a fucking wall
Now you are permanently overwhelmed by a tsunami of misinformation spewing out of your addictive phone instead. Progress.
If you can’t find the right information from the internet then skill issue
Sadly, I gotta disagree. Searching used to be easier, back when search engines prioritized finding useful information. Now they are vehicles for delivering ads and collecting user data.
Google of the early-2000s era was an entirely different site. I used to be able to find almost anything I needed to search for. As far as I’ve seen, there is nothing comparable to that early-Google out there today. (Though I’d be ecstatic to be proven wrong on that!)
Yeah I would agree with the other person 20 years ago. If you couldn’t find it online it probably didn’t exist
Said like someone that only looks at the “sponsored” results and thinks search doesn’t work. Exercise that scroll finger some more
Searx is my way to go when i need to do research, it’s a search engine, that takes results from others
Unfortunately Google is still the king of search engines. Try searching for most technical facts or most common issues or anything else on most search engines and you really can’t find it. You might find some things but you won’t find the amount of information you can find on Google. The problem with the internet nowadays is not that searching has gotten worse, it’s that there is such a plethora of information out there that you have to have the right skill set to be able to go through it. The reason you were able to find everything in the olden days was that there was so few websites out there that it was very very simple to search all of them. And the counterpoint to saying that there is a plethora of misinformation now when you’re looking at your phone simply means that you’re visiting websites and looking at sources that have a plethora of misinformation. It is very very simple to cross reference and find the correct information pretty much anywhere.
I would have agreed with you about 15 years ago when everything on the Internet wasn’t AI slop, calculated misinformation spread by foreign governments, and white supremacists using memes to spread their ideology.
Just disable AI slop from you search engine or stop using google and such, learn how to make un-biased searches, start to understand how to spot a fake information and start questioning what you read
Already do that shit, bro. It isn’t a justification for that trash to exist in the first place. And what the hell is a “biased search”?
I never said that it’s a justification lol, anyway, biased search is when you search something like “Is X better than Y” or something like this, which is wrong to do because it’s biased and so it will give biased results too
Example:
If i search “is tomato more healty than potatoes?” Instead of “The pros and cons of eating tomatoes and potatoes” i will get biased results that will mostly say “you should eat only tomatos!!!”
This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever read.
There is no “bias” in your example. There is only an asinine belief that you can locate ideological framing in innocuous questions about fruit and root vegetables.
This is called a bias query because it will give you biased results
You say this as though AI is only poisoning search tools.
What do you mean? Just use alternatives like Searx or remove AI from duckduckgo, for results just read, AIs are easy to spot
Right, those are all search tools.
All the people replying to you arguing that you can’t trust the internet because of AI and Algorithims… this too is a skill issue. Stop going to Google or MSN or Yahoo There are search engines that don’t use algorithms or AI, and others that don’t use algorithms and you can turn off the AI.
It also helps to understand WHERE you are getting your information from and use watchdog sites that can tell you if a site is a reputable source or not. Heading over to I’Mright.com isn’t going to help you unless you’re looking for confirmation bias.
Exactly!
Who defines the “right information”? The algorithms? The information conforms to what your peer group is saying is the “right information”? It’s consistent with what government agencies are saying?
We really aren’t any better off than just believing what aunt Marge said since you can find the exact same thing she said and things the exact opposite and which one you believe is just down to what feels right. It’s just believing what aunt Marge said with more steps.
ultimately, every individual is responsible for what they choose to take as truth. this is why there has been such an aggressive assault on critical thinking in favor of “parental authority”-- just believe what you’re told and stop asking questions.
it’s not that hard to separate the plausible from the questionable, from the obvious bullshit.
as an example, dr. fauci is a doctor. he’s been a doctor for decades, has risen to high positions in the field, has been producing research, also for decades, which has been cited by other experts in the field frequently. and, prior to bullshit claims by trump and the entire GOP, was never the subject of any controversy.
so the discerning mind has no trouble concluding that it’s reasonable to assume that fauci, who knows what he’s talking about and has no apparent reason to mislead the entire world, is a credible source of information, while trump, a notorious conman who told 30,000 verifiable lies in his first term alone is absolutely NOT. so the GOP preaches “vaccines are bad,” and the “patriotic” american says “vaccines are bad”
yes it’s fucking mind-bogglingly stupid, but the problem isn’t a lack of availability of information, the problem is information literacy–the skill (yes skill) to separate truth (even if only “likely” truth) from fiction (even if comically obviously fiction). which the GOP is actively, deliberately, visciously undermining, while no one says a thing, because we’re preoccupied by nazi gestapo trump cultists rounding up innocent citizens because they’re brown
If you had a question that nobody could answer, you’d go down to the library, open up a drawer with a bunch of note cards in it, look to see if any of the note cards had a word about a concept you wanted to learn about, hope that the card existed, was in the right place, and listed a book that would actually give you the information you wanted.
Or you wouldn’t go through the effort, you’d ask a trusted elder or a friend, they would lie to you, and you’d peddle that misinformation for decades while refusing that you might be wrong. Guess which one was more likely
The first step would be opening an encyclopedia. A lot of households actually had an encyclopedia on their shelves for this very reason. Something which these “pre-internet” rumination threads always seems to neglect.
Honestly I only ever knew one household with an encyclopedia set, I’m sure it depends on the location but where I lived that was more of an upper middle class thing.
I still have an encyclopaedia on my shelf. I have to admit it’s the small edition though.
I also still have a bunch of dictionaries (different languages), and a very outdated atlas.
You’d ask the librarian about where to find books about stuff and get a 3 hour lecture about the Dewey system
And also the books surrounding that book
Always pick a book to the left and one to the right! Is it useful? Likely not, but you’ll never know if you don’t!
Most people in my life still don’t fact check. I’m constantly chasing the truth while the convo runs away full of misinfo
I honestly have no idea how people can live like that. Yet I see it so often that I’m convinced it’s the norm.
People like to live within their comfort zones. I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
Oh look, misinformation, lol. The study was about how science communication is based on outdated ideas and that simply presenting facts is not as effective as whole-person education. The media seems to have just read the title and maybe abstract, and ran with “you can’t change minds, stop trying”, when that’s not what it concluded.
To quote from the conclusion of the study itself:
Facts will not always change minds, but there is promise that other things will, including creating spaces for group dialogue and debate, targeting emotions and embodied knowledge, embracing multiple perspectives, altering environments to create new behaviors, and being strategic about whom we seek to target with our message. We need to provide training for our students in cognitive and behavioral science, as human attitudes and actions are both the primary cause of and the solution to the current conservation crisis (Nielsen et al., 2021).
I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
To be fair, this is exactly what they said. Facts alone are not enough - you need rhetoric. So, not misinformation.
That is not what the study said though. OP said that introducing facts causes people to double down and doesn’t get them to change, when the study says that introducing facts only works a percentage of the time.
Facts alone sometimes works, but it’s more effective when combined with other strategies. Saying facts alone doesn’t work, is misinfo.
Edit: clarifying pronouns
Fair enough. However, I was under the interpretation that evidence remains the same either way; it is the way it is presented that affects the likelihood of someone changing their mind. Presenting the evidence by itself may have a small chance at a positive effect, while including proper rhetoric lowers the negative and increases positive chance.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
I mean I get your point, and I’m sure it’s more nuanced than this and depends on a whole host of other factors like whether it’s a politically charged topic (deoxygenated blood being blue vs HRT actually working), emotional state, connection to other core beliefs (like religious ones), etc. some or all of which are mentioned in the study.
Like I’m sure for topics that aren’t really important, just presenting the correct fact is enough to adjust most people’s view, unless they are particularly stubborn. Like saying “peeing on a jellyfish sting doesn’t really help actually” will usually be met with “oh, huh, I didn’t know that”. But even something as simple as saying “the earth isn’t flat” will make some people very angry. Start listing facts for a more complex topic like climate change, economics, or sociology and people will absolutely double down on whatever black-and-white viewpoint they already hold.
But yeah sure enough, they shouldn’t have used an absolute qualifier I guess.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
The problem that you’re running into here, is that there is no “correct” method to avoid setbacks. It is not possible to have a 100% rate of efficacy when dealing with such a diverse group as the entirety of the human race. Even the study mentions that methods will need to vary depending on who you’re talking to, and it’s likely that methods will need to be changed or adapted as demographics change or new knowledge is reached.
You went to a library and read a couple of encyclopedias.
I had a fantastic working class education at the local library and our home encyclopedia. I definitely carry around 40 year old random factoids and such just like everybody else, but I still love researching things to this day.
I remember that one time when I was around eight, a neighbor put the entire 1976 World Book encyclopedia at the end of his driveway. I ran home, grabbed a wheelbarrow and carted that knowledge back to my house. It was about twenty years out of date at the time but still the basic concepts were valid enough that I kept referring to it until I left for university.
Glad AI is finally taking us back to an era of disinformation
Back?
Yeah, I haven’t really seen a huge shift in the volume of misinformation. Sure, the topics and delivery methods have changed, but it has been a firehose this entire time.
The volume has increased exponentially. With generative AI, there are thousands of “news” sites with landing pages that look better than many real local news organizations.
These sites have agendas and are able to post the same story across the web, written differently each time, to look like events are taking place across the country/world and all being reported on by local news orgs. It’s all astroturf, as far as the eye can see.
This list from Wikipedia just barely scratches the surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites
And this doesn’t even touch on the amount of bullshit real news orgs publish without proper investigation thanks to the 24 hour news cycle and the rush to be the first to cover a story.
Yeah, there used to be misinformation published by news organizations and people with agendas. But that used to take significant effort. Now, I can set up a fake news website and fill it with stories in an afternoon.
There were tons of misinformation sites in place the moment the web existed. I was there, 6,000 years ago…
Seriously though, Fox News and all the other Murdoch owned media has been a firehouse for decades. Magazines and print media like the Weekly World News as well. On the internet the misinformation spreader set up shop early, and it was mainly the search engines that directed people to the better sources.
The main change is that the people are choosing to consume the firehose of social media.
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Because it’s reflecting the colour of the ocean.”
Why is the ocean blue?
Because it’s reflecting the colour of the sky.
why does it hurt when i pee?
It’s reflecting the colour of life.
Red pee means you have sinned.
Damn
This is actually a pretty interesting topic.
I was born in 1982 and we didn’t get the internet until 1998. Which means I was a kid and teen in a mostly analog world.
Your day to day knowledge was formed by things you were taught in school, the things you saw on the news and the people you were surrounded by. That gave you a fairly broad understanding of the world.
If you really NEEDED a correct answer, you’d use an encyclopedia at school or the library, or any specific book on the topic. But you had to be motivated to do that. And even those resources might be limited in scope or unavailable. My local library in the Netherlands would’ve had some books on US history for example, but you wouldn’t really find say, a biography of Jimmy Carter. So at some point, you’d reach the maximum depth of knowledge to be gained in your particular situation.
The internet really helps us drill down way, WAY deeper than what we could find in the 80’s and 90’s. I can now have in-depth knowledge on the most obscure topic and drill down as far as I want.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of people don’t use the web for that. Or end up actually misinformed because of it.
My high school in NZ was pretty poor, so even in the early 00s, we still had Cold War-era maps of Europe in textbooks and on the wall, and no access to the internet (computers were taught to us as glorified typewriters). It took until I was older than I care to admit to learn that Czechoslovakia was no longer a thing.
When I graduated HS, the map on the wall in our history class still had “French West Africa” on it (textbooks were at least more up to date :-)) “French West Africa” hadn’t existed for . . . looks it up . . . about a quarter century before then.
Damn, before I was even born!
My 4th grade science teacher genuinely taught us that “blood is blue before it leaves your body and turns red due to oxidation from contacting the air”
Even as a kid I thought that was stupid. If blood is blue in the body and only turns red when it touches oxygen, then why is it red in the water?
I was told that’s only in the movies. In real life it would be blue.
But then again I got a detention for arguing that the moon is visible during the day. The detention was because I pointed out to the window and said look, and she was embarrassed.
The answer is obvious, dissolved oxygen in the water–duh!
Because there’s oxygen in water. That’s what fish breathe!
The detention was because … she was embarrassed.
Ohh yes, classic detention for proving the teacher wrong. There’s a depressing amount of teachers who rule by their ego instead of by science. It’s why I now consider my school discipline record as a source of pride instead of shame.
One if my brothers teachers sent over half of her class to detention one day and the vice principal brought them all back like “you cant just send your whole class, get a grip”
That’s wild to me cos like… We didn’t need internet to tell us this was incorrect.
It’s not like it doesn’t have some logic to it. Blood carries oxygen throughout the body and then cycles back through the lungs to get more oxygen. So when you look at your arms and see the blue veins we just thought that was obviously the deoxygenated blood returning to the heart.
It made basic sense, so no one was running down to the library to check out a medical textbook to disprove it.
Ever see a blood draw? Blood comes out of a vein, into a non-O2 environment.
I think we just don’t do as much critical introspection as we like to think. Its easier to imagine maybe there was a tiny amount of O2 or something than that the thing we were taught was entirely false.
I think we just don’t do as much critical introspection as we like to think.
It’s definitely true, and it shows that the stuff you learn as kids is even more ingrained than we even notice most of the time. Kids don’t normally have blood drawn, so it’s not like elementary schools were filled with a bunch of kids saying “wait a minute, that didn’t happen with my last blood draw.”
There were actually about 5 of us that contested it and she tried to say “they drew that blood from your arteries”
You look when they draw blood?
Yes. Its neat. You dont?
My first thought was how ears and noses look red when sunlight shines through them. If blood was blue, wouldn’t they be blue or purple?
Veins appear blue because the skin and veins refract the light to permeating the skin causing the wavelenths to appear blue. It was well known in the early 2000s. She was just stupid and had no business teaching science.
We had the internet and a handful of us tried to contest it. She said “look at your textbooks, they clearly drew that blood from your arteries”
Whenever I would ask a question I would be told to go look it up. I was never sure if I was surrounded by people who didn’t know anything or if they just wanted to get me out of the house by sending me to the library for a few hours.
Not mutually exclusive options fwiw 😅
This is why encyclopedia salesmen was even a thing.
If you didn’t have that, go to a library.
Eventually there was encyclopedia britannica which was basically one of the coolest things you could have for free on your computer in that era.
Funnily even the usage was pretty similar to doom-browsing Wikipedia:
- pick a volume
- open random page
- read about medieval remedies for mental illnesses
- open another random page
- read about some rare tropical bird
- repeat and rinse
- maybe brag about your tidbit knowledge to your friends later (if you had any)
And there was a friend’s older brother or cousin, who said some unbelievable horseshit, you thought was true for many years. And you didn’t even ask.
Joe Rogan
Actually fucking Joe Rogan is the perfect analogy, he just has random people on that say some stuff to him and he is like damn that’s crazy and doesn’t even fact check it, and then what he likes he carries forward with him and what he doesn’t like hearing just ignores
That still holds true even with the internet around
