How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online
An interesting crossover from a Matt Levine column linked from another HN story (BlackRock&#x27;s anti-coal announcement):<p><i>When I was an investment banker, I once negotiated a billion-dollar swap deal with the chief financial officer of a foreign company. I was pretty sure he was the CFO. He had business cards. He was smart and knowledgeable. I met him, once, at the company’s offices, though after that we only spoke by phone. Our local banker knew him. When we signed the deal we got representations of authority and so forth. But at some point someone on my desk asked how I knew that he was really the CFO of this company. What if he was just some guy, taking my bank for a billion dollars? What if he snuck into their offices to meet with me? What if the office I went to, on a brief and busy visit to a foreign city, was fake? What if he was the company’s janitor? What if our local banker—a relatively new hire—was in on it too?</i><p><i>None of these worries were especially well founded, but once you start down that path it’s hard to stop. It’s hard to be certain that anyone is who they say they are, especially if they’re thousands of miles away in a country with a different language and legal system. You have checks and certifications and people to vouch for them, but if you are in a paranoid mood you might worry that they are all part of the conspiracy too. My colleagues spent months asking me “how’s that deal with the janitor going?” Mostly I laughed, but it was a little nerve-wracking.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2020-01-14&#x2F;blackrock-has-green-plans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2020-01-14&#x2F;blackr...</a><p>Turns out another company, Lekoil, got had.<p>The nature and role of information and media is interesting.  We <i>trust</i> that what we see, or hear, or read, has a strong correspondence to some underlying reality.  That it isn&#x27;t some selective sample of reality (lying by ommission).  That representations are as they claim.<p>And, most of the time, even amongst strangers, this is the case.<p>What mass media allow, though, is for a control point, in that changing a small quantity of information can have a profound effect.  The promise, again and again and again of &quot;new media&quot;, from the cave painting to mobile apps, has been to decentralise information, put it in the hands of the public and individuals, remove gatekeepers, and give both voice and fact-checking abilities to anyone.<p>Sometimes that works.<p>But very often, the problem is that we find that trust has a scaling problem.<p>- We can&#x27;t keep track of who is or isn&#x27;t an honest source.<p>- Honest sources turn dishonest.<p>- Honest sources are subverted, from within, without, overhead, or underneath.<p>- Vulnerabilities are found, and disinformation injected.<p>- Playing to the crowd, often on emotion, empathy, identity, and above all, fear and anger, are used to distract or mislead.<p>Ironically, both excessive centralisation <i>and</i> decentralisation are vulnerable to attack, though by different modes.  Centralised media tends to play strongly to establishment power.  Decentralised media is more subject to either the madness of crowds or nonestablishment forces.<p>Full vetting, constant vigelance, perfect identification, global reputation and credit scores, are not only impossible but quite often themselves avenues of attack and control.<p>But a mix of partial approaches can very often prove <i>sufficient</i> whilst also being <i>robust</i> against manipulation.<p>Of all the lie-busting techniques I&#x27;ve encountered, the one which seems most useful is to seek correspondence across elements -- from different sources, within different elements of a story, with known facts.  Where a direct comparison to a ground truth isn&#x27;t possible, at the very least <i>this points out where potential concerns may lie.</i><p>(The method is also strongly applicable to many technical situations as well:  if your monitoring, meters, or gagues disagree with one another, you may not know <i>what</i> is wrong, but <i>something</i> almost certainly is.)<p>Circumstances in which an element, or quite often, a <i>person</i> is highly resistant to verification, most especially if they react in anger or emotive appeal (shaming, insults, special pleading, appeals to empathy or pity), you may also want to look with suspicion.  These aren&#x27;t perefect tells of lies, but they&#x27;re often provoked by someone prefering to conceal manipulation.  Nonhuman elements (sources, data, systems) which are suddenly resistant to further exploration are also suspicious.<p>A tool I try to employ is suspended judgement.  That is, if I <i>don&#x27;t have to</i> make a decision on truth value, I don&#x27;t make one.  &quot;When it&#x27;s not necessary to make a decision, it&#x27;s necessary to not make a decision.&quot;  And if you <i>do</i> have to make a decision based on partial or uncertain information, making a decision in the direction which <i>minimises harm</i> and <i>maximises future options</i> is often the best.<p>Often actions can be taken to simply reduce risks -- keep agrieved parties separate, head to higher ground, move away from falling obects, ease off the throttle, raise vigelance, tell others to be alert.  These don&#x27;t commit to a given path, but lower risk and increase options.<p>That said, several resources mentioned in the Verge article and discussion are excellent.<p>WNYC &#x2F; On the Media&#x27;s &quot;Breaking News Handbook&quot; is indeed excellent.<p>As is Carl Sagan&#x27;s Fine Art of Baloney Detection.<p>A few years back I compiled a number of these in &quot;On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness&quot;
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;28ge14&#x2F;on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;28ge14&#x2F;on_nons...</a><p>Another set of rhetorical dirty tricks -- billed as originating from a specific political operative though I&#x27;ve no clear evidence that it did, but also find no denials it did <i>not</i>, is here, along with several similar guides:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2d0r1d&#x2F;the_reactionary_political_debate_playbook_karl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2d0r1d&#x2F;the_rea...</a><p>Finally, there&#x27;s a case of a nearly 120 year old hoax I ran across, and decided to debunk as thoroughly as possible, this being Thomas Westlake Gilruth&#x27;s exceedingly long-lived &quot;Banker&#x27;s Manifesto&quot; fraud.  Just the thing for those who like this sort of thing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;39w8u4&#x2F;jp_morgan_and_the_bankers_manifesto_of_1892_hoax&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;39w8u4&#x2F;jp_morg...</a>