[AKN #16] Truth is in the headline, censoring disinformation, election fraud, COVID update, and great tits

another krappy newsletter #16

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Reporting to you live from the Bay Area. Appears we are at the beginning of a long winter. Not like “its gonna be cold.” That doesn’t happen here. What I mean by long winter is that “hella people are gonna get COVID over the next three months and California is going to shut everything down.” SF and LA already came in hot this week with shut downs. No indoor dining. No gyms. We essentially have a curfew at 10pm. All in the name of believing science.

I mean, I missed that part of the presentation where viruses with an aerosol transmission mechanism become extra dangerous after 10pm. But I am sure its based in good science. No way they are using this media moment as a stage for their performative politics. They take their job seriously and they understand that it is important to lead by example. That is why they want all Californians to show that WE BELIEVE SCI….

Alexei Koseff @akoseff

Gov. @GavinNewsom attended a birthday dinner for one of his political advisers last week with at least a dozen people from several different households, the type of gathering his administration has discouraged during the coronavirus pandemic.

sfchronicle.comNewsom attended French Laundry party with more households than California advises during pandemic<p>Gov. Gavin Newsom attended a birthday party for one of his political advisers at The French Laundry last week that included people from several households, the type of gathering his administration has discouraged for Californians during the coronavirus pandemic.</p>

This sounds like an episode of a dramady sitcom called “California Ivory Tower Politics.”

Lead actor Gavin gets back from his most recent performative progressive hijinks. The camera pans to him chowing down on his $400 plate at French Laundry. “Do as I say, not as I do” he whispers to no one in particular as he wipes his mouth with a Burberry handkerchief. Cue laugh track.

Who can blame the audience for laughing? It really is a great joke.

Weather has been great out here in the Bay though. In fact, today’s forecast is calling for slightly sunny with a chance of another nuanced hot take.

So gather around.

Don "Big Chooch" Moynihan @donmoyn

Sharing excellent content with my grateful followers

To the newsletter!

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The truth is in the headline

The defining issue of the information age revolves around identifying truth.

The process for turning information you receive into “truth” looks like:

Step 1: You start with a base probability that what you were told is true.

Step 2: You update that probability as you get more information.

When you hit a certain probability you either become:

• Skeptical of the story’s truthiness (ie: prob < 10%)

• Certain of the story’s truthiness (ie: prob >90%)

Bias is how we shortcut this process. It affects the above process in the following ways:

• Your baseline trust for the source of the information. You may start at absolutely certain or certainly skeptical depending who gave you the information.

• The way your trusted sources respond to the story. You update more towards the side of whoever you hear most often.

Bias is not always bad. In some cases, leveraging people you trust helps make a correct decision faster. You don’t have infinite time to look into infinite topics. The source of the information may have earned your trust by being correct many times over before. So it makes sense to trust your intuition and assume they are right. However, where we run into a problem is when institutions leverage the trust you have for them (ie: CNN, Fox, NBC, the president, etc), but are not doing their due diligence on a subject.

“Fake news” occurs when rather than researching a topic, these institutions go with the story that best fits the lean of their audience. They do not actually verify if its true and neither do their audience. It is not about truth, it is about narrative-market fit. This would not be an issue if everyone checked their sources. But...We don’t. Studies suggest that just over half of all people spend 15 seconds or less reading an article while digitally grazing. Likewise, nearly three out of five link-sharers have not so much as clicked on the headline that they’re passing on. It would be correct to state that the purpose of most articles is not to inform, but to minimally support the desired headline for wide dissemination (Eric Weinstein, Episode 39 of The Portal).

Let’s play out a hypothetical.

Everyone is circulating a polarizing news story in which they have only read the headline. You ask someone how they know that to be true.

Well. Congratulations on now being part of the problem! What you may not know is that you just violated the invisible rules. Regardless of who you talk to, prepare for a meme meant to invalidate your dissenting opinion.

Disagree with one side and you get a mean spirited yet nuanced meme:

Disagree with the other side and you get something more on the nose:

Neither one wants to engage. The goal is to remove the mechanism by which one can dissent with their opinion.

That is where we are today:

• We have content creators that we trust who leverage our psychological vulnerabilities by writing outrageous unvetted headlines.

• We glance over the headline, decide we know the whole story, and we need to tell everyone we know.

• Anyone who disagrees with us gets psychologically bullied into submission.

Crazy when you consider the amount of what we accept as truth that comes solely from headlines of major news networks.

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A poor response to disinformation and a slightly better suggestion

Social media companies decided in the 2020 US election that the users of their site needed to be warned about “disputed claims”. The idea is we need someone to help correct for our biases and fact check statements before we go spreading an unverified story.

There are two obvious problems with this approach that are becoming more and more clear.

1. We have traded our biases for their biases.

It is not possible to scale knowing what is and what is not true for every story so they have to pick and choose what to focus on. The selection of what needs to be disputed and what does not is where bias shows up.

Nowhere is this more clear than what is being flagged as disputed. “How can they police this and not that?” is where this kind of censorship will always logically end. Such as:

Not to mention that high profile polarizing candidates on the other side of the aisle will always be scrutinized a little bit more than the average user.

This will result in trigger happy Departments of Truth (or whatever they call themselves) doing silly things. Like:

2. Crowding out the contrarian opinion

We are not the first civilization to reach “truth nirvana.” Today, we all share some opinion that society will find ridiculous in a hundred years. Somewhere someone is spouting a contrarian opinion that is laughed at today, but is actually the truth.

In a world where we refuse to listen to disputed statements, we run the risk of missing a very important contrarian truth hiding in plain sight. If we continue flagging all disputed facts, we will soon find ourselves in a scenario where we wish we heard that person out.

FAQ: OK you contrarian/devil’s advocate/nihilistic dick, if everyone is wrong then why don’t you go ahead and tell us what to do. You’re so smart after all. What can we do to stop this runaway train?

Glad you asked so politely. It is always a pleasure chatting with hypothetical people who treat my opinions with such respect!

Every status update, tweet, diary entry, and voice message is going to be a biased take on something. That is how having an opinion works. The solution is not to eliminate certain opinions. The solution is to help people understand what is a good versus a bad argument.

The long term solution is better education in critical thinking. This is a decades long re-education process and admittedly I don't have a good recommendation here.

In terms of a short term solution, given what we know about media consumption and creation, I think the following actions could help:

Attacking bias at the content creator level:

1. Remove institutional bias and directly reward individual writers. Companies like Substack allow writers to communicate directly with an audience. Like I am doing! People can write what they want to write rather than what the major media organization wants them to say to their audience.

Attacking bias at the content consumer level:

1. Remove bias from headlines. Programs that read in and neutralize the headline into something that is not so emotive in nature. Maybe it could read in an inflammatory headline and look up the neutral Russell Conjugation. Or maybe it reads in the headline and down ranks the article if the headline is too click baity.

2. Provide a list of other articles that present the counter argument to a viral article. Programs that read in the article, figure out how quickly it is spreading, and if it meets some minimal virality requirements feeds the user the counter argument article (which would almost certainly exist if it is a popular topic).

Open to hearing any other suggestions!

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A dispassionate analysis about election fraud

The certainty with which both sides are claiming that fraud did or did not take place leaves me skeptical of either position. Here is a collection of my notes about election fraud and whether or not there is any way this could have occurred.

Election Fraud Overview

TL;DR - I have not seen any evidence that election moving fraud took place. Like I predicted in the previous newsletter, there are anecdotes rolling in about people who did not have their vote counted and people who did not vote, but somehow cast a vote. But I have not seen evidence of election changing fraud as of today.

Disclaimers

Lets start with four disclaimers:

1. There may exist some source that I have not seen yet so I am open to reviewing these if anyone wants to send them my way.

2. It is difficult to validate the data sources these people use.

3. Assuming appropriate data was used, you cannot equate statistical anomaly to voter fraud. When you find an anomaly, you need to investigate deeper.

4. My position: We are innocent until proven guilty. Show me the data before you start claiming guilt. Or basically this thread:

Andy McCarthy @AndrewCMcCarthy

I’m sympathetic to POTUS’s right to challenge results, and need to demonstrate to over 71M Trump voters that election was valid. What I object to is presumption that massive fraud occurred. 1/15

What is the goal here?

The ultimate outcome Trump supporters are going for is a Trump victory confirmed by the Supreme Court and Senate. The mechanism of how this occurs is slightly confusing to me, but I guess it is possible?

Here is a thread on more specifics of how they believe this will go down:

CulturalHusbandry @APhilosophae

This is going to drag on quite a while. Let me cover the basics:

Fraud Hypothesis Tracker

Trump supporters believe that there are three ways election fraud occurred:

HYPOTHESIS 1: Votes were counted incorrectly

Proposed Next Step: Recounts

Evidence to support hypothesis: 2,600 ballots found in a Trump friendly Georgia county. Nothing else I have seen so far.

Description: Supporters believe some votes were not counted. Trump lost several states by thin margins so the idea is that he could flip these states. I find it hard to believe that this would change the outcome. With that said, there was this interesting find in Georgia that is projected to swing the vote in +800 for Trump direction. Still not state flipping worthy. But an interesting finding.

The Hill @thehill

Vote recount in Georgia finds over 2,600 ballots in Floyd County hill.cm/W9QBBU4

HYPOTHESIS 2: Mail in ballot fraud

Proposed Next Step: Recounts. Voter registration review to look at dead people and people who did not request a ballot voting.

Evidence to support: None.

Description: “Oddities” noted so far:

• A “record numbers of ballots submitted with only a vote for Biden and no other votes”. I have no way to validate if this statement is accurate.

• Some shoddy statistics citing anomalies in voter turnout. While I find some of these interesting, none of these analyses are sharing the data source they are using or how they address the research question of “how do we do statistical anomalies in an election year that had record mail in voting?”

Worth paying attention to: In this video, Matt Braynard argues that charts/graphs showing statistically anomalies are not actionable (meaning they will not lead to a legal remedy or reforms). The only evidence that could be used in a court of law would be:

1. Affidavits. People need to sign documents that say this happened and this did not happen. They need to make themselves liable for being wrong in a court of law. This would take the form of either:

   • People saying they did not vote, but there are votes on file for them

   • People voting and not having their votes received

2. Death certificates. If dead people voted, you should be able to find death certificates and received ballot status. This is simple.

Matt’s analysis is an interesting one to follow along with as he goes through all of the data in a really transparent way to address the mail in voter fraud claims. Only legit right leaning source I have found on the subject. Everything else is blatantly biased and deliberately obfuscates where their data comes from.

HYPOTHEIS 3: Dominion software “glitches”.

Proposed Next Step: Review of the counts and how the digital lines up with the paper ballot count.

Evidence to support: None.

Description: This one is a wild card. All systems are hackable. The people who created election software are not the first people in history to make something unhackable. The thing is how would you show this without counting ballots by hand to ensure that they match ballot count by machine.

Two interesting notes:

1. I was surprised to find that Elizabeth Warren and Klobuchar raised these concerns during the primaries.

2. Foreign interference in an election would probably take the form of hacking a voting machine.

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COVID is still a big deal

COVID is peak dangerous in the United States right now.

Next couple weeks are a good time to be inside. Be careful.

I am still following these guidelines.

Here is a thread going over the threat of COVID right now:

Michael L. Barnett @ml_barnett

I spent the entire month of February 2020 in a state of silent panic. Watching Europe + US outbreaks play out, I knew something terrible was coming. But few of my colleagues shared the depth of my fear. It feels like this again. And I think the public still has no idea. 🧵

Highlights:

Hospitalization counts are at or approaching their highest level EVER in the US across many states and we have just entered the exponential growth part of the infection curve.

This is not a drill.

This is a profound crisis approaching.

And the most vulnerable will suffer most

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But we have two vaccines!

Yay Moderna and Pfizer! We did it!

The market was a really big fan.

h/t Nick Maggiulli

I am going to cover more on vaccines next time.

I tuckered myself out talking about truth and fraud. I am exhausting.

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The loss of great tits

I hate to end emails on such a somber note, but this is important.

A study from Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Oxford University shows that global warming may claim great tits as another one of its victims.

Ends up that great tits are dependent on specific food sources and may not be able to adapt fast enough to the change of seasonal patterns that the climate crisis is bringing.

We need to act now. I don’t know if there is any turning back if we lose great tits.

Here is a picture of a pair of great tits:

Thanks MN for the find.

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Closing time

We’re only 87 away from 200 homies! If you enjoy what you’re reading, I’d really appreciate you inviting your smartest/funniest friends or sharing this post: