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0 pointssomenameforme2y ago0 comments

I think there's quite a lot of great ways to get through the muck. For currently happening events, simply look at the various contradictory views, and find where they intersect. It's in that spot that one will nearly always find the truth. For past events, where the clear truth has come out, go back and visit various sites using something like archive.org. It often becomes quite clear which groups are making impartial statements, and which are not - which generally should give some predictive power about the veracity of their statements in the future.

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TaylorAlexander2y ago

I’m not quite sure if you’re suggesting that the middle ground is usually correct, but I think that heuristic fails on a lot of important issues.

somenameformeOP2y ago

That's not at all what I'm saying. Let's say side one in a war says a school was bombed and 40 innocent people were killed. The other side says they attacked a school that was housing soldiers and killed 10. What can you take away from this? Well the facts that both sides agree upon - that a school building was bombed and at least 10 people were killed. You miss the details and narrative, but that's probably a feature more than a bug anyhow. There's a great quote from Thomas Jefferson [1] that hits on a similar concept (as well as the Gell Mann amnesia effect!) :

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To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

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[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...

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