- The media very rarely lies, but often presents true facts in misleading ways.
- Commenters proposed counterexamples of the media lying, but upon further examination, these examples were found to be true facts presented in a misleading way.
- Examples of this include Fox News’ Senator Rand Paul Claims Statistical Fraud In States Where Trump Lost, The Daily Sceptic’s Twice As Many Vaccine Deaths As COVID Deaths In US Households, Poll Finds, Los Angeles Times’ The Flu Has Killed Far More People Than Coronavirus. Why All The Frenzy About COVID-19?, and Infowars’ FBI Says No One Killed At Sandy Hook.
- In each case, the media was not making anything up, but rather presenting true facts in a deceptive way.
- Censorship is not a primitive action, as it requires subjective judgment calls about which sources’ true facts are important vs. irrelevant, which sources’ studies are valid versus flawed, and which sources’ points that you don’t have good responses to are too annoying or conspiratorial to take seriously.
- People want to believe that the bad people are doing something fundamentally different than the good people, but wrong people are just trying to reason under uncertainty and evaluate the relative strength of different sources of evidence – the same thing we’re doing.
- Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are just misfires of normal Bayesian reasoning and mis-applied reinforcement learning, respectively.
Click HERE for original. Published December 29, 2022
