Tuskegee Experiments. Operation Sea-Spray. Strontium-90 blowing into feedlots. 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate experiments on unwitting soldiers. Agent Orange sickening soldiers (like my father). Lying to the public while poisoning and sickening citizens is not a new phenomenon. What IS new is the information infrastructure that allows people having it shoved down their throats to publicly ask questions in real time. THAT is what the "bio-security state," as you brilliantly put it, wants to quash.
To be clear, the "bio-security state" nomenclature is not original to me - I can't quote its exact origin, but my first encounter as it relates to the pandemic was Giorgi Agamben's Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, translated by Valeria Dani: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538157602/Where-Are-We-Now-The-Epidemic-as-Politics
For perspective, there's "a mountain of evidence" showing that mass persuasion efforts -- e.g. propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, religious proselytizing -- are, by and large, ineffective: https://tinyurl.com/2p88ydyj
This makes sense, since very few information operations are successful without their associated 'wet works,' but there are effects other than changing minds, including loss of social cohesion, trust, etc.
Dec 6, 2022·edited Dec 6, 2022Liked by Sarah Hartman-Caverly
Which is why I think it's much more important to encourage trusting reliable information -- what mainstream media overwhelmingly provides -- than to encourage distrust of unreliable information. By default, people generally aren't gullible, so focusing on the latter project risks causing people to be even less accepting of reliable information than they too much already are.
I agree that people generally aren't gullible - I'm an epistemic populist, probably to a fault! Which is why I assume their distrust is well-founded, and I believe "the people" is not the problem to be solved, but rather the trustworthiness of the media and other information institutions. I wrote about this at length for IFLA Journal: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/1cfe3ac0-fbdb-4a26-9ec3-d2e3339830f8
I think it is very likely true that the mainstream media overwhelmingly provides reliable information in two senses -- by total volume across all time, and by taking the average of all spin / falsehood / correction / etc. But on acute matters of significance, I generally think the pressure to be first overwhelms the drive to be right in the immediate term. A variety of factors, anchoring bias not least among them, makes it difficult for people to update their beliefs in light of new or corrected information. This is not the same as being gullible, but rather of not knowing what one does not know. Further, the norm of objectivity / truthfulness in reporting is a relatively new development (I reference Aznar 2020 for this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/erev.12510) whose time may have passed (I reference Rutenberg 2016 for this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness-and-a-proudly-provocative-presidential-candidate.html).
I would further cite media critics: Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, Jack Shafer, Erik Wemple, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, etc. (not intended to be an exhaustive or canonical list!).
"But on acute matters of significance, I generally think the pressure to be first overwhelms the drive to be right in the immediate term. A variety of factors, anchoring bias not least among them, makes it difficult for people to update their beliefs in light of new or corrected information."
Not just people, but also the editorial boards putting the information out. If the New York Times, for instance, would pre-emptively point out that a short 10 years ago they were allowing Putin himself to write op-eds in their paper (and maybe explain what they were thinking by doing so), the suspicion and loathing they express towards him in the last few years would feel less jarring...and less confusing.
I forgot to mention Sy Hersh and, my personal favorite, Hunter S. Thompson (a major influence on Taibbi, who wrote the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)!
I’m not convinced that generally people aren’t gullible. The pandemic measures enjoyed widespread support even after most vaccinated persons got the virus. These measures even meant people losing their jobs and pensions for being being fired “with cause” and unable to get new professional class jobs as they all instituted polices require COVID vaccine to be hired. I can’t see most people not being gullible when most people believed the vaccine was stopping spread of COVID even while seeing everyone get COVID. Maybe there is a different term instead of gullible? People seem to believe whatever their trusted news sources tell them. Even when they are living proof of it’s inaccuracy. I think it’s due to people being short on time and needing to farm out their decision making to entities like government and news.
Dec 18, 2022·edited Dec 18, 2022Liked by Sarah Hartman-Caverly
Pretty ordinary for people to support policies that hurt other people more than (if at all) themselves (and might even be in their self-interest to do so). That's not evidence of gullibility. Nor is refusal or hesitancy to get vaccinated (or the reverse) [1] [2]. Nor is the current level of distrust of mainstream media [3]. What would perhaps be evidence is if the most staunch supporters of pandemic measures were precisely those to whose material interests they were most damaging [4]. And even where the latter seems likely -- people appearing to hold beliefs against their material interests -- there may well be underlying incentives at work in doing so that have little to do with gullibility [5].
Also, material interests exist in a highly individualized hierarchy and cannot be accurately assessed by third parties.
I spent eight weeks on unpaid leave under (ongoing?) threat of denial of tenure and termination of employment due to my refusal to consent to my university's covid-related personal health data collection and medical intervention mandates. This was clearly not in my material interest.
However, I saw a long-term material benefit in maintaining the confidentiality and autonomy of my physician-patient relationships (GP and midwife) - not just on my own behalf, but because I believe medical freedom is in *everyone's* material interest.
Ultimately, the issue was not whether or not I was/am vaccinated against covid, but whether I felt it was epidemiologically useful for my employer to have that personal information, or to allow them to compel me to use a specific telehealth testing company and transmit my personal health data to an enterprise resource management system (SalesForce). I continue to contend it is not.
And it's worth also noting that accuracy of self-report of one's interests can, and may often be, orthogonal to what they actually are and to their actual pursuit. And it may often be more adaptive to be unaware consciously of one's interests, the better to facilitate their pursuit:
"There are reasons for believing that one does not need to know his own personal interests consciously in order to serve them as much as he needs to know the interests of others to thwart them."
I agree about the lack of time to pay attention to anything other than the mainstream media. Also, pharma money saturates not just the media but universities, politics, and the medical profession, and various government entities are now benefitting financially from drugs and vaccines. I can understand that it is difficult for people to grasp just how distorted these institutions have become.
Further -- quantitative -- perspective on "the state of the information society":
"There has been a surge in misinformation during the pandemic, but we show that in absolute terms the latter received little attention compared to more reliable information, and that in relative terms the far greater surge in reliable information consumption has been at least as important, if not more important."
"Overall, untrustworthy news outlets (as rated by NewsGuard)"....
As we've previously discussed in other outlets, I don't find outsourcing the evaluation of un-/trustworthiness of news outlets to NewsGuard all that convincing, especially as regards information about the pandemic. (Why not evaluate un-/trustworthiness of new outlets according to public opinion? Isn't that the dis-/trust that actually matters?) As far as I'm concerned, the fake news is coming from inside the house!
How or why would public opinion be a benchmark for research attempting to quantify the public's reliance on (un)trustworthy news outlets?
Unless you have some evidence or research to marshal, it seems to me epistemically reckless to dismiss research that uses NewsGuard -- I don't understand why you should have confidence in doing so.
Here, again, are some of the researchers and research entities who use it:
Because public trust is the most direct measure of un-/trustworthiness I can think of? Especially in light of other empirical research you've shared regarding the public's ability to discern news quality.
Tuskegee Experiments. Operation Sea-Spray. Strontium-90 blowing into feedlots. 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate experiments on unwitting soldiers. Agent Orange sickening soldiers (like my father). Lying to the public while poisoning and sickening citizens is not a new phenomenon. What IS new is the information infrastructure that allows people having it shoved down their throats to publicly ask questions in real time. THAT is what the "bio-security state," as you brilliantly put it, wants to quash.
Indeed!
To be clear, the "bio-security state" nomenclature is not original to me - I can't quote its exact origin, but my first encounter as it relates to the pandemic was Giorgi Agamben's Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, translated by Valeria Dani: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538157602/Where-Are-We-Now-The-Epidemic-as-Politics
I made sure we had Agamben's book in our library collection.
For perspective, there's "a mountain of evidence" showing that mass persuasion efforts -- e.g. propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, religious proselytizing -- are, by and large, ineffective: https://tinyurl.com/2p88ydyj
This makes sense, since very few information operations are successful without their associated 'wet works,' but there are effects other than changing minds, including loss of social cohesion, trust, etc.
Which is why I think it's much more important to encourage trusting reliable information -- what mainstream media overwhelmingly provides -- than to encourage distrust of unreliable information. By default, people generally aren't gullible, so focusing on the latter project risks causing people to be even less accepting of reliable information than they too much already are.
I agree that people generally aren't gullible - I'm an epistemic populist, probably to a fault! Which is why I assume their distrust is well-founded, and I believe "the people" is not the problem to be solved, but rather the trustworthiness of the media and other information institutions. I wrote about this at length for IFLA Journal: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/1cfe3ac0-fbdb-4a26-9ec3-d2e3339830f8
I think it is very likely true that the mainstream media overwhelmingly provides reliable information in two senses -- by total volume across all time, and by taking the average of all spin / falsehood / correction / etc. But on acute matters of significance, I generally think the pressure to be first overwhelms the drive to be right in the immediate term. A variety of factors, anchoring bias not least among them, makes it difficult for people to update their beliefs in light of new or corrected information. This is not the same as being gullible, but rather of not knowing what one does not know. Further, the norm of objectivity / truthfulness in reporting is a relatively new development (I reference Aznar 2020 for this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/erev.12510) whose time may have passed (I reference Rutenberg 2016 for this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness-and-a-proudly-provocative-presidential-candidate.html).
I would further cite media critics: Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, Jack Shafer, Erik Wemple, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, etc. (not intended to be an exhaustive or canonical list!).
You probably heard about this recent debate...https://www.nationalreview.com/news/matt-taibbi-douglas-murray-dominate-trust-in-media-debate/
Gladwell and Goldberg are no chumps!
"But on acute matters of significance, I generally think the pressure to be first overwhelms the drive to be right in the immediate term. A variety of factors, anchoring bias not least among them, makes it difficult for people to update their beliefs in light of new or corrected information."
Not just people, but also the editorial boards putting the information out. If the New York Times, for instance, would pre-emptively point out that a short 10 years ago they were allowing Putin himself to write op-eds in their paper (and maybe explain what they were thinking by doing so), the suspicion and loathing they express towards him in the last few years would feel less jarring...and less confusing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html
I forgot to mention Sy Hersh and, my personal favorite, Hunter S. Thompson (a major influence on Taibbi, who wrote the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)!
The mainstream media may overwhelmingly provide reliable information but by falling down on that job enough, they have nobody but themselves to blame for the resultant lack of trust. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/matt-taibbi-douglas-murray-dominate-trust-in-media-debate/
I’m not convinced that generally people aren’t gullible. The pandemic measures enjoyed widespread support even after most vaccinated persons got the virus. These measures even meant people losing their jobs and pensions for being being fired “with cause” and unable to get new professional class jobs as they all instituted polices require COVID vaccine to be hired. I can’t see most people not being gullible when most people believed the vaccine was stopping spread of COVID even while seeing everyone get COVID. Maybe there is a different term instead of gullible? People seem to believe whatever their trusted news sources tell them. Even when they are living proof of it’s inaccuracy. I think it’s due to people being short on time and needing to farm out their decision making to entities like government and news.
Pretty ordinary for people to support policies that hurt other people more than (if at all) themselves (and might even be in their self-interest to do so). That's not evidence of gullibility. Nor is refusal or hesitancy to get vaccinated (or the reverse) [1] [2]. Nor is the current level of distrust of mainstream media [3]. What would perhaps be evidence is if the most staunch supporters of pandemic measures were precisely those to whose material interests they were most damaging [4]. And even where the latter seems likely -- people appearing to hold beliefs against their material interests -- there may well be underlying incentives at work in doing so that have little to do with gullibility [5].
[1] https://theconversation.com/infections-of-the-mind-why-anti-vaxxers-just-know-theyre-right-38926
[2] https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(15)00197-7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1364661315001977%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
[3] https://acerbialberto.com/post/2022_fake_news/
[4] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZAyEnKU9Rox0-bOFNowVruZNjmGx4bov/view
[5] https://psyarxiv.com/avcq2
Also, material interests exist in a highly individualized hierarchy and cannot be accurately assessed by third parties.
I spent eight weeks on unpaid leave under (ongoing?) threat of denial of tenure and termination of employment due to my refusal to consent to my university's covid-related personal health data collection and medical intervention mandates. This was clearly not in my material interest.
However, I saw a long-term material benefit in maintaining the confidentiality and autonomy of my physician-patient relationships (GP and midwife) - not just on my own behalf, but because I believe medical freedom is in *everyone's* material interest.
Ultimately, the issue was not whether or not I was/am vaccinated against covid, but whether I felt it was epidemiologically useful for my employer to have that personal information, or to allow them to compel me to use a specific telehealth testing company and transmit my personal health data to an enterprise resource management system (SalesForce). I continue to contend it is not.
No regrets!
"and cannot be accurately assessed by third parties"
They certainly can, especially when conceived in terms of evolutionary biology:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12392
And it's worth also noting that accuracy of self-report of one's interests can, and may often be, orthogonal to what they actually are and to their actual pursuit. And it may often be more adaptive to be unaware consciously of one's interests, the better to facilitate their pursuit:
"There are reasons for believing that one does not need to know his own personal interests consciously in order to serve them as much as he needs to know the interests of others to thwart them."
https://t.co/m2mESseN6p
I agree about the lack of time to pay attention to anything other than the mainstream media. Also, pharma money saturates not just the media but universities, politics, and the medical profession, and various government entities are now benefitting financially from drugs and vaccines. I can understand that it is difficult for people to grasp just how distorted these institutions have become.
Further -- quantitative -- perspective on "the state of the information society":
"There has been a surge in misinformation during the pandemic, but we show that in absolute terms the latter received little attention compared to more reliable information, and that in relative terms the far greater surge in reliable information consumption has been at least as important, if not more important."
https://journalqd.org/article/view/3617
"Overall, untrustworthy news outlets (as rated by NewsGuard)"....
As we've previously discussed in other outlets, I don't find outsourcing the evaluation of un-/trustworthiness of news outlets to NewsGuard all that convincing, especially as regards information about the pandemic. (Why not evaluate un-/trustworthiness of new outlets according to public opinion? Isn't that the dis-/trust that actually matters?) As far as I'm concerned, the fake news is coming from inside the house!
How or why would public opinion be a benchmark for research attempting to quantify the public's reliance on (un)trustworthy news outlets?
Unless you have some evidence or research to marshal, it seems to me epistemically reckless to dismiss research that uses NewsGuard -- I don't understand why you should have confidence in doing so.
Here, again, are some of the researchers and research entities who use it:
https://www.newsguardtech.com/industries/researchers/
Also notable is how exemplary NewGuard is in its transparency and provision of verifiable credentials among its members:
https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/why-should-you-trust-us/
Because public trust is the most direct measure of un-/trustworthiness I can think of? Especially in light of other empirical research you've shared regarding the public's ability to discern news quality.