How do we restore consensus in an age so divorced from fact?Image: jimjarmoIf I have recognized the spread in drug warnings and financial doublespeak, where the corporate use of language approaches the absurd, where the shell of a communicative ...
The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth
"Truth is more than a collection of facts; it's a mechanism for belonging."
The Constitution of Knowledge
America has faced many challenges to its political culture, but this is the first time we have seen a national-level epistemic assault: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish tr...
How People Weave Online Information Into Pseudoknowledge
Misinformation has found a new natural habitat in the digital age. Thousands of forums, blogs, and alternative news sources amplify fake news and inaccurate information to such a degree that it impacts our collective intelligence. Researchers and policy makers are troubled by misinformation because it is presumed to energize or even carry false narratives that can motivate poor decision-making and dangerous behaviors. Yet, while a growing body of research has focused on how viral misinformation spreads, little work has examined how false narratives are in fact constructed. In this study, we move beyond contagion inspired approaches to examine how people construct a false narrative. We apply prior work in cognitive science on narrative understanding to illustrate how the narrative changes over time and in response to social dynamics, and examine how forum participants draw upon a diverse set of online sources to substantiate the narrative. We find that the narrative is based primarily on reinterpretations of conventional and scholarly sources, and then used to provide an alternate account of unfolding events. We conclude that the link between misinformation, conventional knowledge, and false narratives is more complex than is often presumed, and advocate for a more direct study of this relationship.
The Internet Has Made Dupes—and Cynics—of Us All
The typical response to the onslaught of falsehood is to say, lol, nothing matters. But when so many of us are reaching this point, it really does matter.
The truth has got its boots on: what the evidence says about Mr. Damore’s Google memo
I’m saying, sir, that a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
Loper OS » No Formats, no Format Wars.
Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold "old wine in new bottles," bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small. Why? Simply because we are, to use the technical term, suckers. Not always as individuals, but certainly collectively. The defining attribute of the sucker is, of course, an inability to learn from experience. And it seems that meaningfully learning from our mistakes is a foreign concept to us. Nay, it is anathema. The darkest heresy imaginable. Something no one would bring up in polite company. Something only spoken of by rabid crackpots, on their lunatic-fringe blogs, during full moon.
How to Change Public Opinion - Niskanen Center
Policy advocates engaged in changing public opinion rarely pay much attention to what the academic literature says about how public opinion is formed and how and why it changes. That’s too bad, because while political scientists disagree about a lot of things, this is not one of them. Several decades of robust empirical tests offer […]
How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Concentration
Disagree though we may about what's wrong with life in the 21st century, all of us — at least in the developed, high tech-saturated parts of the world — surely come together in lamenting our inability to focus.
Twitter is wrong: facts are not enough to combat Alex Jones
Jack Dorsey thinks unfettered speech will save the world, but all the evidence says it won’t
How The Friedman Doctrine Leads To The Enshittification Of All Things
We recently wrote about Cory Doctorow’s great article on how the “enshittification” of social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) was helping to lower the “switching costs&#…
What is this? The case for continually questioning our online experience - [ Perspectiva ]
What options do we have, amidst the algorithms and incentives underpinning our media ecosystem, for getting a more expansive view of what’s really going on?
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.