In which I expand on my previous post about misinformation studies, argue there is no such thing as "inoculating yourself against misinformation" & warn against top down control
"haute bourgeois propaganda"...yesterday marked the 120th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight. Only 9 weeks previous to that flight, the NYT mocked the idea of heavier-than-air flight:
And in 1920, Robert Goddard's rocket experiments were dismissed by that newspaper in an almost unbelievably arrogant manner:
"That professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
The real threat to our informational ecosystem is …
Secret, illegal discrimination against hiring Republican professors.
All tax exempt orgs should be required to be diverse, at least 30% Republican & 30% Democrat.
NYT false info, misinformation, for 2 years of Collusion hoax fake news, certainly helped Dems in 2018 election. NYT, and US (deep state) govt censorship of the truth of H Biden’s corruption, with smoking gun evidence on his laptop, helped Biden win in 2020. (Rigged election! Stolen)
Most college educated folk don’t want to believe that the US election was actually stolen. They look for, and provide a market for, rationalizations that it wasn’t stolen. Just like the Williams theory predicts they, and Dan Williams himself, will do.
Now, you might ask: Why do I need a mnemonic for this? Well, imagine walking out of your house, moisturised and thriving, when misinformation suddenly catches you off-guard. In such a situation you need DEPICT, so that you quickly remember what the DNA of misinformation is, correctly identify the misinformation chasing you and repel it! Bam! The Misinformation is dead, on the floor, screaming and kicking.
Except: it really wasn't stolen. Ruxandra even cites the claim that it was as 'brute misinformation'. If the public believing simplistic things that are far more nuanced in fact, constitutes 'stealing', then what elections aren't 'stolen'? (For example, the 'Collusion hoax': Garland documented plenty of suspect links between Trump Inc and Russia, but no actionable evidence of collusion; also, what you leave out in a rather misinformatio-y way, is that he found clear evidence of illegal *obstruction* by Trump -- and left it to Congress to prosecute, because, well, he's Merrick Garland. William Barr then proceed to misinform the public with his own biased summary,leading Trump and his broadcast and online media supporters to claim 'no collusion, no obstruction' . Remember? And btw, all of that was covered and dissected ad nauseam...in that darned old NY Times)
Out of curiosity, did you read *Conservative Cranks and Liberal Meta-Cranks* by now retired professor Steve Dutch? It is a bit old now but it arrives at similar conclusions as you did.
"Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be cranks, and their crank beliefs are coarser and cruder, but liberals are far more likely to be meta-cranks, using perfectly correct data but weaving it into a distorted meta-reality. I once attended a lecture by an expert on Sierra Leone, who described traditional village life where the chiefs were routinely presented with gifts in exchange for exercising their power on someone's behalf. The expert then described the modern government, where bribery was rampant, and attributed the corruption to the legacy of colonialism. Afterward, I asked "The government of Sierra Leone seems to be just the village society writ large. Why are you assuming the corruption is due to colonialism?" If it's routinely expected that local big men get gifts for their influence, why be surprised when it translates to the national level? He really didn't have much of an answer, and more interestingly, it was obvious that he never really thought to ask the question. Absolutely everything in his talk was true, as far as I know, and I have no reason to doubt any of it, but his observations were filtered through anti-colonialist goggles. Basically, any possible observation can be interpreted as a result of colonialism.
"Conservative cranks who base their beliefs on a factual premise like the Bible being literally inerrant have no choice but to reject any science that threatens their foundation. But liberal meta-cranks tie their beliefs to assumptions like "inequality is always the result of injustice," "Third World poverty is the result of colonialism," and so on. These assumptions are flexible enough that any data whatsoever can be accommodated to them."
<“Is this claim supported by evidence?” And assessing the strength of evidence for specific claims is what entire institutions and most humans are already doing and have been doing forever, with varying degrees of success.>
Karl Popper argued that inductive logic is impossible; therefore, there is no such thing as “supporting evidence”. However, we can test our (unsupported) conjectures and (conjecturally) refute them. E.g., if we have a theory that all swans are white, it may eventually be refuted by the existence of a single black swan (unless it’s a swan covered in soot, etc).
Interesting to read this in 2025, when some of the so-called “misinformation” or “disinformation” examples given have turned out to be credible or at least worthy of closer scrutiny.
- Biden’s senility was not misinfo. We all saw it in the debate.
- Questions about the Covid vaccine are now becoming less taboo because there are unexplained side effects that were swept under the rug at the time
- There is now some evidence that a number of tactics were used to sway the 2020 election, not least of all the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the FBI later confirmed to be true.
"haute bourgeois propaganda"...yesterday marked the 120th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight. Only 9 weeks previous to that flight, the NYT mocked the idea of heavier-than-air flight:
https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/
And in 1920, Robert Goddard's rocket experiments were dismissed by that newspaper in an almost unbelievably arrogant manner:
"That professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-correction-heard-round-the-world-when-the-new-york-times-apologized-to-robert-goddard/?sh=321463304543
The real threat to our informational ecosystem is …
Secret, illegal discrimination against hiring Republican professors.
All tax exempt orgs should be required to be diverse, at least 30% Republican & 30% Democrat.
NYT false info, misinformation, for 2 years of Collusion hoax fake news, certainly helped Dems in 2018 election. NYT, and US (deep state) govt censorship of the truth of H Biden’s corruption, with smoking gun evidence on his laptop, helped Biden win in 2020. (Rigged election! Stolen)
Most college educated folk don’t want to believe that the US election was actually stolen. They look for, and provide a market for, rationalizations that it wasn’t stolen. Just like the Williams theory predicts they, and Dan Williams himself, will do.
It’s a great theory.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while:
Now, you might ask: Why do I need a mnemonic for this? Well, imagine walking out of your house, moisturised and thriving, when misinformation suddenly catches you off-guard. In such a situation you need DEPICT, so that you quickly remember what the DNA of misinformation is, correctly identify the misinformation chasing you and repel it! Bam! The Misinformation is dead, on the floor, screaming and kicking.
thank you!
Except: it really wasn't stolen. Ruxandra even cites the claim that it was as 'brute misinformation'. If the public believing simplistic things that are far more nuanced in fact, constitutes 'stealing', then what elections aren't 'stolen'? (For example, the 'Collusion hoax': Garland documented plenty of suspect links between Trump Inc and Russia, but no actionable evidence of collusion; also, what you leave out in a rather misinformatio-y way, is that he found clear evidence of illegal *obstruction* by Trump -- and left it to Congress to prosecute, because, well, he's Merrick Garland. William Barr then proceed to misinform the public with his own biased summary,leading Trump and his broadcast and online media supporters to claim 'no collusion, no obstruction' . Remember? And btw, all of that was covered and dissected ad nauseam...in that darned old NY Times)
Great stuff.
Out of curiosity, did you read *Conservative Cranks and Liberal Meta-Cranks* by now retired professor Steve Dutch? It is a bit old now but it arrives at similar conclusions as you did.
https://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2013/02/conservative-cranks-and-liberal-meta.html?m=1
"Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be cranks, and their crank beliefs are coarser and cruder, but liberals are far more likely to be meta-cranks, using perfectly correct data but weaving it into a distorted meta-reality. I once attended a lecture by an expert on Sierra Leone, who described traditional village life where the chiefs were routinely presented with gifts in exchange for exercising their power on someone's behalf. The expert then described the modern government, where bribery was rampant, and attributed the corruption to the legacy of colonialism. Afterward, I asked "The government of Sierra Leone seems to be just the village society writ large. Why are you assuming the corruption is due to colonialism?" If it's routinely expected that local big men get gifts for their influence, why be surprised when it translates to the national level? He really didn't have much of an answer, and more interestingly, it was obvious that he never really thought to ask the question. Absolutely everything in his talk was true, as far as I know, and I have no reason to doubt any of it, but his observations were filtered through anti-colonialist goggles. Basically, any possible observation can be interpreted as a result of colonialism.
"Conservative cranks who base their beliefs on a factual premise like the Bible being literally inerrant have no choice but to reject any science that threatens their foundation. But liberal meta-cranks tie their beliefs to assumptions like "inequality is always the result of injustice," "Third World poverty is the result of colonialism," and so on. These assumptions are flexible enough that any data whatsoever can be accommodated to them."
<“Is this claim supported by evidence?” And assessing the strength of evidence for specific claims is what entire institutions and most humans are already doing and have been doing forever, with varying degrees of success.>
Karl Popper argued that inductive logic is impossible; therefore, there is no such thing as “supporting evidence”. However, we can test our (unsupported) conjectures and (conjecturally) refute them. E.g., if we have a theory that all swans are white, it may eventually be refuted by the existence of a single black swan (unless it’s a swan covered in soot, etc).
Interesting to read this in 2025, when some of the so-called “misinformation” or “disinformation” examples given have turned out to be credible or at least worthy of closer scrutiny.
- Biden’s senility was not misinfo. We all saw it in the debate.
- Questions about the Covid vaccine are now becoming less taboo because there are unexplained side effects that were swept under the rug at the time
- There is now some evidence that a number of tactics were used to sway the 2020 election, not least of all the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the FBI later confirmed to be true.
I think you're misrepresenting misinformation studies.
how does this apply here?