As the NPR example shows, this is not as dire as you think.
That BTW is a reason why I do not use them as a source for science matters, it has some value as a political source.
Not quite, it is not just spin but the news that they choose to tell their viewers is an important factor, there had been a few studies that shows that Fox news viewers are indeed more ignorant of many important issues.
And so it goes for the issues the sources dwell on, one very good example for me was the Benghazi affair, Fox news reported the made up conspiracy day in and day out, while a source like MSNBC did not reporte much about it. As the mostly Republican congressional report on the issue told us, what MSNBC did was the right approach, there was nothing about that conspiracy.
The breadth of knowledge available to humans precludes people from becoming experts on the multitude of subjects they might hold an opinion on. It’s simply impossible. What we can do is become competent at evaluating the credibility of various sources.
Deference to expertise is absolutely a choice and an intellectual skill. Some people look at subjects they know little about, and just say “all those pointy headed scientists are wrong, my gut says otherwise”, and that’s obviously a big gaping intellectual flaw. Some people say “Well, almost every person who has spent their lives studying this issue using the scientific method agrees with this position. It would be foolish of me to go against that based on a 15 minute googling of the issue”
You’d classify the same groups as equally rigorous, equally valid, with one just happening to be right by coincidence. I call BS on that.
It does if NPR actually is a better news source, and they chose it for that reason. We aren’t assigned a preferred media outlet at birth. If people make better decisions about where to get their information, they are absolutely playing an active role in being more well informed.
Incidentally, comparing Fox News to NPR as some sort of “two sides of the same coin” assertion is a very good example of the false balance I’ve been trying to address in this thread. NPR is a vastly superior source of information.
Being informed isn’t just about the facts, any more than literacy is just about being able to read the letters. It might be a prerequisite, but not particularly far along the path to actual understanding.
I’ll acknowledge one other bias present especially in TV news, which is that the amount of screen time spent on a subject is totally uncorrelated with its importance. Yeah, Fox spent a shit-ton of time on Benghazi, which was at best a very minor screwup. I think their reasons for doing so are obvious, but in the end was it really that much worse than spending weeks on the MH370 disappearance? Neither one served to inform their audience.
And like I said, being informed isn’t just about factual information; it’s about having the background on that information and being able to make meaningful decisions based on it.
Yes. I think that very few people actually do this. This small group might well be massively biased to liberals, but it doesn’t speak to the majority.
Obviously, the actual experts came to their conclusions through valid means. That wasn’t coincidence. The rest of the population, who have probably never looked up the name of the guest on some radio show, or skimmed a scientific paper, or read a blog by practicing scientists, has at best just gotten lucky in that their preferred source happens to be reality-based.
And I never said the two groups are equal. Just that the differences are concentrated in a small elite, and that the general masses have roughly equal lack of rigor.
I disagree. Even if everything Rush Limbaugh said was the absolute truth, I wouldn’t listen to him since he’s an angry, paranoid blowhard. I’d rather listen to a source that I knew was filled with misinformation if Rush wasn’t on it.
People choose their sources for all kinds of reasons, not all of them good ones. Sometimes it’s just because that’s what their parents listened to. As Construct said, political leanings are highly heritable.
If you believe that’s what I said, then you haven’t been reading my posts at all. At every point I have said that NPR is a better source than Fox. It’s just that neither is good enough to be truly informed on a subject. NPR may give you a farther head-start, but one should still not take it as gospel.
IMHO and based on experience and what I have seen happen to close relatives it is really a very important thing to choose the right sources of information by constantly checking how accurate they are. I agree with **SenorBeef **on this, we can not know everything, so we have to choose our sources of information wisely.
MH370 does not affect the opinion of Americans on how to vote and to change public opinion, Benghazi does it for many.
Yes, but the point stands, it is not as horrid a situation as you picture it once more reliable sources of information are used, in my case BTW I had my encounters with the pseudoscience of the Huffington post before and it was one of the reasons why I do not use them much.
I agree about the constant checking. I just don’t agree that a large fraction of people do this on either “side”.
It could very well change their perception of airline safety. Airplane disasters get far more screen time than car crashes, even though the latter are far more dangerous. Even a fairly small number of people deciding “planes are unsafe; I’ll take the car instead” will add up to a large number of fatalities.
The problem with your narrative is this place is full of group think, confirmation bias, and total non-acceptance of anything you not agree with.
Take for example the recent series of news articles concerning the proposed claim of a coming mini ice age. I read on that from 3 different news sources. Ok. Interesting theory of two magnetic cycles within the sun and I had never heard that before. However this was news the GW advocates absolutely do not want to hear so what happens here in the Dope ?
Well the author was criticized because she has a Russian first and last name. Gasp !!! certainly a Russian cannot be trusted on this. Next that she was not from a top tier University and Gasp !!! certainly that is a major issue. Therefore this theory is pure bullshit. Go back and look that is basically the talking points.
What a reasonable person without an agenda would do is say this is an interesting theory and where is the peer review to see what others in the scientific community say on this.
Not to be. It is shout out and shut down dissenting thoughts.
It gets worse than that. Google, for instance, can give you search results based on your past internet activity, thereby creating an echo chamber within the largest depository of information on the planet. This is why I recommend everyone to opt out of this feature in their Google settings.
Bear in mind that in American political discourse, slavery abolition, women’s suffrage, most of the New Deal programs, etc., etc., were far outside the Overton Window for a very long time.
My math would be a little bit simpler. Given the hypothetical starting point of 100% accuracy, the echo chamber is more likely to remain at or close to 100% accuracy by using whatever internal methods it used to reach that point than introducing elements which are not 100% accuracy.
Not my impression, The Bad Astronomer (yes he is/was a poster at the SDMB) debunked what the Russian had claimed back in 2011, as a planetary scientist TBA (aka Phil Plait) he has indeed the expertese to report that in the past the Math Russian professor also did go for the canard of all the planets increasing their temperature, also a misunderstanding. What we got from the news was just more of the same misunderstandings that mainstream and denier media loves to report to their viewers.
And well, the right wing echo chamber got you indeed really well.
It’s possible that my belief is a false balance but I think it’s born out by my experience. When people choose sides on a topic they obviously think they are correct. It makes them feel even better if they can talk themselves into believing that the other side is dumb, biased, or ignorant. It’s a form of cognitive bias. I think your bias is showing right here:
There is no question that conservatives are wrong about AGW. However, there is no question that liberals are wrong about GMO and nuclear power. Both sides ignore the science when it is convenient. That you focus on AGW and not GMO/Nukes is evidence to me that you have some connection to a liberal echo chamber.
@Dr. Strangelove: The idea that being informed requires each person to be engaged in their own primary data collection, or even to do their own review of primary data sources, is so absurd that it hardly merits further consideration. If that were the standard, then ultimately nobody would be informed because the process of advancing knowledge would be so inefficient as to come to a grinding halt.
Being informed in a workable efficient fashion means gathering information, evaluating the validity or utility of that information, and then evaluating the reliability of the method that you used to gather that information. People simply have to rely on secondary sources of information for humanity to succeed. Where we too often fail appears to be in the process of evaluating either the validity of the info or more fundamentally in reviewing the reliability of our methods.
If you get information from a source and it turns out to be wrong, you must reconsider and ultimately discard that source. Your methods are not reliable.
@Construct: It is awesome that you would choose gay marriage as an indictment of any sort of liberal echo chamber or liberal groupthink.
Homosexuality, and gay marriage, have been social taboos; quite literally the product of nothing but group think. Evidence supporting prohibitions against them have been exclusively the product of echo chambers or supernatural sources (essentially gussied up group think).
You’ve offered a firm defense of echo chamber reasoning, apparently completely ignorant of having done so.
Funny, I consider myself a liberal and I support nuclear power and GMOs.
Incidentally we had a few discussions about that before, what I found is that yes, there are a lot of people from the left that are against it, but what I found out is that there is also a huge percentage of people from the right that are also against them when the time to build the power plant or a GMO test field is set, in those cases NIMBY is what is prevailing, it is still bad IMHO.
Going forward I found that the Obama administration and many democratic leaders do support nuclear power when used as a part of dealing with the control of our emissions, Republicans do not support those efforts and do prefer to toss out nuclear power together with renewable energy sources and better controls of our emissions.
Yup, and there are conservatives on this board (e.g. XT, IIRC) that support AGW.
I agree that NIMBY knows no political barriers; all the more reason we need to push it harder.
This is where I disagree with you. No recent politician has dealt a bigger blow to nuclear power than Obama when he shut down Yucca Mountain, a program the Bush strongly supported.
An Inconvenient Truth came out almost 10 years ago. If the left had gone all-in on nuclear power and worked with Republicans we’d likely have plants coming online right now, reducing carbon emissions with the side benefit of limiting fracking (another environmental concern) and lowering the influence of Middle East regimes. But no, the liberal echo chamber would rather point fingers at Republican recalcitrance on AGW and feel smug about how we “believe the science”.
Again, that was for were the nuclear waste was supposed to end, IIRC in a previous discussions I pointed out that Arizona with their conservative senators and governors was looking into making the dump here in Arizona. (And I would support that BTW) At last report they are still [del]stalling[/del] looking.
Freaking NIMBY.
In the meantime the Obama administration has increased the funding for the still under construction nuclear power plants. (That fell into a lot of disrepute after a few disasters that many from the left and the right are aware of)
That is because I found that indeed it is the Republicans the ones that are not willing to vote for concerted efforts to control our emissions that do include nuclear power, BTW I have pointed at this bit of legislation several times in the past, that you ignore it is a clear demonstration of what the echo chamber is doing to you: