Networks of Trust and Fake News

Networks of Trust

I am going to be working on two assumptions:

• Objective reality exists, but
• We can only know about it through direct observation.

People lie constantly even when they don't think they are lying.

There's someone for everyone. Just be yourself. He/she is perfect, a real unicorn. Game is all that matters. Lifting is all that matters. Facial symmetry is all that matters.

You aren't important enough for the government to watch. Real capitalism/socialism has never been tried. The police/protestors started that riot. Race/Gender/Intelligence is completely a genetic/social construct.

You could easily be repeating a lie that you took as truth from another person. The fact is that most lies are almost indecipherable from the truth. Unless you can reveal the truth through controls and repetitions, the truth is impossible for you to find personally even if it exists. The problem is you would spend your entire life testing the small amount of facts that are open to scientific inquiry instead of eating and fucking like a good lifeform should do in order to pass on genes.

Instead, we form hierarchies and networks of trust in order to efficiently navigate life. Most human behavior is instinct and imitation. We do what we see works and you would be surprised at what works. In fact, our brains are wired to ignore data that might invalidate our deeply held beliefs and remember anything that reinforces them. Evolution has "guided" us to the point where most truth really doesn't matter that much. This phenomena is called confirmation bias and is one of the most important features of human consciousness and interaction.

Early Journalistic Integrity and Modern Mainstream Collusion

The news media have always been human and therefore part of some network of trust. Until the Internet, reaching large numbers of people was the sole territory of a very small set of companies. These companies were and are run by a small number of individuals that largely espouse the same beliefs. They hired people who they liked and so on and so forth. This is what made them seemed unbiased when there weren't competitors and colluding to write narratives today.

Mainstream journalists go to the same schools, read the same books, get the same updates, go to the same conferences, go to the same parties, talk to the same people, and generally hold the same beliefs. Even if they weren't on email lists, chats, and other clubs together, they would still write stories with a similar narrative. They see the world through mostly the same lens.

Diversity of Thought and Fake News

The Internet has turned our society upside down. New media outlets are springing up everyday with wildly differing beliefs. They are segmenting the market in order to capitalize on niches of human beliefs. Joe Blow from a mechanic shop can now read a daily blog of anarcho-capitalists, radial marxists, and everything in between with ease.

From outright lies and scams to differing interpretations of primary source documents, we are getting nearly as many versions of news as there exist ideologies. Some are the same. Some are completely incompatible. All of it boils down to trust. Do you believe the alleged rapist or the accuser? Do you believe the officer's account or the criminal's? Do you believe the Milo attendee or the Antifa protestor? Do you trust CNN, Fox, or None Of The Above? The Internet will bring you an a la carte service of facts. You can now pick and choose whatever you like.

The prevalence of image, sound, and video editing software is now playing on peoples' trust in "direct observation" as well. What was almost exclusively the purview of media and governments is now available to losers in basements trolling Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, 4chan, and other gathering places for people with far too much time on their hands.

These ideas and opinions have always existed in some form in academia. The only difference now is that diversity of thought is available to the common consumer now. The facts are thoughts you like. Everything else is Fake News.

How Can We Define and Avoid Fake News?

When everything is Fake News, nothing is, but there must be at least some minimum filter we can use to get rid of the worst of the garbage. There are some basic filters like:

• Is this photoshopped?
• Is this staged?
• Is this clickbait designed to get a pageview with no actual story?
• Is this story not even remotely based on the acknowledged accounts?
• Is this correlation or causation?
• Does this jive with current accepted science?
• Does this jive with current accepted history?

The real key is to find and develop your own trust network. You need to find the sources that do the deep dives for you. You can develop these by finding smart people and diving deep on some of their more important stances to see if they hold water.

This means you need to learn basic logic, epistemology, statistics, science, and math. Once you have a handle on that, you can move onto biology, psychology, praxeology, economics, and other soft sciences. If you can't verify at least the methods and data that your sources use, then you might as well just watch cable news.

Just looking at that list shows you why most people don't do it. Why study climate change papers when you can just copy someone's opinion? Does it really matter to you if climate change is going to blow up the Moon in 2 years or if it is a hoax by the Chinese? How are you even going to do anything about it? Most opinions don't effect your ability to eat and fuck, which are the only two things your genes really care about. This is why you can convince most of the public with almost anything.

TL;DR.

Finding and identifying Fake News is hard in some cases, impossible in others. You need to build up your knowledge base in order to really do your own fact checking. Over time you can build a network of trust that both suits you and helps you filter and identify the Fakest News.