This is a question I have been pondering for a while. If your knowledge of most of the world is from penny papers then how do you know what is true and what is not?
Arguably all the newspapers/websites that do news are funded in the same way now, advertising rather than directly by their readership throughout the western world, everyone reads penny papers and don't have an alternative. Since they get their news from each other, and its potentially all made up how does anyone brought up in that environment know what is actually true?
Even the "non-penny" papers always followed their own policies. There was always bias and assumed "truths" that weren't. As an example, "big" media supported the "weapons of mass destruction exist in Iraq and are the good reason for war" story.
Some years before, Osama bin Laden was still "a good guy" of the media, presented as a former "anti-Soviet warrior" and a "Saudi businessman":
Then consider the support for the "moderate rebels" in Syria now.
If you want something almost 200 years old, Britain presented their wars in support of their opium traders(!) to China, after China forbade the opium trade, as the "enforcing" of "free trade." That's how Britain got Hong Kong.
It seems a bit strange to say that the US supplied him with chemical weapons and that they were lying that he had chemical weapons. Not technically impossible for both to be true, but seems somewhat unlikely.
Is the thinking that it was bad intelligence or falsified intelligence? And what about the other foreign intelligence agencies that supposedly corroborated it?
Not unlikely at all. If you really believed that up to now, here's your red pill: Long ago, Iraq bought different weapons. But after the first Gulf War in 1991, the UN Security Council required Iraq to eliminate its WMD. Iraq destroyed it then. The UN inspectors were able to confirm that. Saddam let them search, they have found nothing, but the USG politicians didn't care. They wanted the war.
The Guardian reports in 2011: "Curveball" admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war"
Other foreign intelligence agencies?
On another side of the ocean, UK and Tony Blair did their part of lies: the "secret services" presented a work of a student, which they copied from the internet(!) as their own "research" and a "proof":
"much of the work in the Iraq Dossier had been plagiarised" "The most notable source was an article by then graduate student" copied "verbatim including typographical errors"
And the attack of Iraq on Kuwait, that was the cause of the first Gulf war, was also result of the signaling that the US prepared for their ambassador (not "don't touch Kuwait, we'll attack you then" but "we want peace" which Saddam translated "if you do it fast we won't do any more war afterwards"):
""There was no way that April could have done anything more than she did without authority going all the way up to the president of the United States," said White. "Because we don’t make idle threats. If you’re going to threaten, you have to really mean it.""
By the way, the testimony of a "nurse" about "Iraqi killing babies" that was a direct excuse for the first Gulf war? Fake, she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in the US:
"October 6, 2004 - The final Iraq Survey Group report is released. The report concludes that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction."
"March 31, 2005 - The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reports that the intelligence community was "dead wrong" in its assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities before the U.S. invasion."
The US really did it best to find anything once they were there. But there wasn't anything at all. The West did sell Saddam the weapons earlier, but he also destroyed it all for the West. He simply didn't want war.
Sweet, thanks for the sources. I still find myself doubting that Saddam actually eliminated all of his weapons that, as you demonstrate, there's proof that he had at one point. There's known corruption scandals at the UN involving Iraq, and the IAEA officials require cooperation with the government.
However, it seems to me that for the most part very few people would switch from anti-war to pro-war based on this issue.
It is mostly, but not entirely, irrelevant to the moral questions surrounding foreign interventionism.
I don't know what is true, but with the media, with some experience, you can see signs. For example they often leave out parts of the story. If you really think about it, you notice the story has holes and you start wondering what they left out.
Also, they usually have an agenda, and you'll notice how all the facts presented somehow highlight that agenda.
Also, simply try to think about all the ways the story could be wrong, or that would disprove the assumption. Are theses things addressed in the story? If not, they probably don't have an interest in conveying the truth. An article usually works by shining a light on certain aspects of an event. Try to mentally shine the light on other aspects.
Essentially, don't fall for "proof by anecdote". If they present you with a sob-story of somebody to relate to, try to generalize and ask yourself if it is still true.
I didn't say I differ from typical people. Everybody could see these signs.
But if you want: I am a trained mathematician, so I am trained in identifying the root assumptions of problems.
I am aware of the typical ways to lie with statistics. There are books about that, everybody can and SHOULD read those. For example choosing certain time intervals, making charts not start from zero to inflate a trend, picking the aspect that best supports your claim (for example, either use relative growth or absolute growth when describing an issue - one more murder in a town can mean "crime incidents increased by one" or "crime incidents increased by 100%"). Playing with proportions, like drawing circles for comparisons and using diameter (instead of area) to correspond to the values you want to show. And so on - there are many possibilities, and they are all being used.
So, for example, if I see a chart depicting some trend over a period of time, my immediate instinct is to ask "what would it look like if the chart would start one year earlier?".
Also, I think fake news might have become a topic these days because people also get their information from social media. They often know about aspects that an article doesn't mention, so they are more often able to identify articles as fake news.
Overall, there is just one thing you have to do: try remain skeptic at all times. "Bend over backwards" as Feynman put it to disprove your own assumptions.
Nothing of that is specific to me, and it is not complicated. You just have to be willing to challenge your assumptions.
For starters, I would recommend reading those books on how to lie with statistics, and your essential Feynman. And get your news from multiple sources and compare them.
I don't know what your problem is? Somebody asked for how to spot fake news or find the truth, I answered. Just because everybody could look for certain signs, doesn't mean everybody does.
Everybody can learn about certain signs. If the person asking already knew them all, why did they ask? Then their question was vacuous, not my reply. Just because a question has an obvious answer, the answer is vacuous? What is going on in your mind? What are you driving at?
Have you ever read one of those books about how to lie with statistics? You really, really should.
The question you were responding to was about people bought up in an environment where they had no access to other sources of knowledge. I think a response that suggests that everybody ought to know how to determine fact from fiction is in that context a little heartless.
Thanks for the recommendation on reading a book about stats - which would you recommend? I already work on statistical models in my job and would probably get in trouble if they didn't lead to tangible results so I might even have the book on hand.
You working on statistical models is a scary thought, given that you seemed unable to understand my criticism of my primitive analysis of lofeatgoogle.
I read a book in German (specifically on how to lie with statistics), don't know which ones to recommend in English. There is the obvious one with the name "how to lie with statistics", but it is very old. Otoh, available for free (but I haven't read it).
Thinking, Fast and Slow was a lot about bias, but not sure if it really gets the point across effectively.
Seeing how you interpret my comments, maybe starting with statistics is actually backwards. Perhaps start with language and communication first? Sorry if my comment sounds mean, but it really seems a bit crazy how you try to bend my comments into something outrageous.
Your claims, that the lifeatgoogle twitter showed a bias towards women and PoCs that indicated google wasn't interested in hiring men, aren't the topic that's being communicated in this thread.
Arguably all the newspapers/websites that do news are funded in the same way now, advertising rather than directly by their readership throughout the western world, everyone reads penny papers and don't have an alternative. Since they get their news from each other, and its potentially all made up how does anyone brought up in that environment know what is actually true?