Science Magazine: Timely new AAAS Editorial

Truth and democracy in an era of misinformation

   

Concern about misinformation and its toxic effects on democracy is widespread. A survey of nearly 1500 experts by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation (the latter being intentionally spread, whereas the former may arise accidentally) as the top global risk during the next 2 years. Examples of misinformation-fueled events abound. In the United States, baseless claims about election fraud in 2020 by the losing presidential candidate, Donald Trump, culminated in a violent insurrection against the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. At the time of this writing, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are fearful of the future after Trump baselessly alleged on national TV that immigrants there were eating their white neighbors’ pets—a racist trope dating back centuries...

 

Although specific instances of disinformation-fueled tragedies can be readily identified, the scientific landscape surrounding misinformation is sufficiently nuanced to require careful unpacking. Two intertwined issues are particularly challenging: the adjudication of what exactly constitutes misinformation and the identification of the intentions of the communicator, the latter of which is crucial to differentiating misinformation from disinformation.

We know that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic was not caused by 5G telecommunications equipment. We know that Trump did not fake having COVID-19. We know that there was no widespread irregularity or fraud during the 2020 US presidential election. Those are facts, established with sufficient certainty that, in the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, “it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Any attempt to refute them can be unambiguously labeled as misinformation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that independent professional fact-checks of false claims have been found to not only correlate highly with one another but also with the ratings of bipartisan samples of the public.

 

But just because truth can often be readily ascertained, it does not follow that facts can always be unambiguously identified ... The existence of such ambiguity and contestation should provide the impetus for us to hone our evidentiary skills in adjudicating competing claims, in the same way that, throughout the history of science, uncertainty has stimulated development of better theories and methodologies to resolve challenging issues.

 

The existence of ambiguity does not license the claim that researchers should stop studying misinformation altogether, as some have suggested by appealing to the difficulty of adjudicating competing claims ... [R]esearch on misinformation identified the decades-long disinformation campaign by the tobacco industry that has contributed to the deaths of millions of people, despite the fact that the truth value of some specific assertions is difficult to adjudicate.

 

The existence of ambiguity also does not license the willful dissemination of falsehoods ... But even accepting that ethical imperative, how can we identify when a communicator is intentionally spreading disinformation rather than inadvertently misinforming others? How do we know that Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election is really a lie?

 

By definition, lies are intentional, and it is therefore unsurprising that they can leave fingerprints that differentiate them from truthful information.

At the level of individuals’ speech, many machine learning models exist that can identify willful deception from text, often with accuracies exceeding 90% ... 

 

At an institutional level, the legal system is no stranger to ascertaining intentionality on a daily basis. Inferring intentionality is the difference between manslaughter and murder, and the concept of perjury rests precisely on the identification of willful lies ...

The fact that the legal system is anchored in the notions of truth, honesty, and evidence entails two additional ways in which willful dishonesty can be identified. First, there are instances in which even literal truths can be found to be deceptive and hence subject to legal sanctions, for example, when sellers fail to disclose all relevant information about a product even though they truthfully report some of the information. Identifying truthful but misleading or deceptive information is particularly crucial in light of research that has found the impact of misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines to be greater overall than that of clearly false information. Second, because the penalties of lying to the court are severe, lawyers tend to be painstakingly honest in court. Hence, when they or their clients make statements in public that differ from those made in court, willful dishonesty in public can be inferred.

We know that Trump’s “big lie” about the election was a lie because his public accusations of fraud were made at the same time that his lawyers, who filed more than 60 (unsuccessful) lawsuits to overturn the election results, admitted in court that there was no evidence of fraud. Two lawyers who did claim fraud were sanctioned and fined by a federal judge ...

Although politics differs from jurisprudence, democracy similarly requires some degree of epistemic integrity. For example, citizens must know that elections are fair and that an incumbent will transfer power peacefully when voted out of office. Democracy also requires reliable shared knowledge for meaningful debate and to ensure normatively good policy outcomes ...

In summary, identifying the truth value of some assertions can be difficult, but that does not make clear falsehoods any less false. Similarly, it can be difficult to infer the intentions of a communicator, but that does not mean lies are suddenly truths, and it does not mean we cannot (or should not attempt to) identify lies. On the contrary, the distinction between truth and falsehood and the ability to infer intention has been at the heart of jurisprudence for centuries if not millennia, and the impetus and frameworks for making these distinctions are similarly critical to ensuring the integrity of democratic societies. Relinquishing these principles is unthinkable.

Read all of it. And, join AAAS. 

Goes to my prior post on Artificial Arguments.

See also #OnDisinformation. Mental Immunity, anyone?

32 days to election day. Ahhhh... The Daze of Our Lives.

SATURDAY OCT 5TH UPDATE

Exactly one month to election day. I Finished Matthew Taylor's bracing book The Violent Take It By Force.

Couple of Money Quotes.

So, any and all manner of human logical & evidentiary "reason-based" arguments are irrelevant in the face of Biblical citations and summary "prophetic apostolic" assertions?

Silly me. A Science of Deliberation? Why bother?

 

Below: These are the lind of dopes we face.

 

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I minimally commend to you these two books for close study ASAP, one month out from Election Day.

 

Cited Ari's book here.

 

SUNDAY UPDATE

   

"On Sept. 28, JD Vance spoke at a Christian political event hosted by the most influential religious leader you’ve probably never heard of.

His name is Lance Wallnau, and he is one of the chief proponents of a radical religious doctrine called the Seven Mountain Mandate. He’s an election denier. He’s said Kamala Harris engaged in “witchcraft” in her debate with Donald Trump and that an “occult spirit” is working “on her and through her.” And he’s a leader of one of the most dangerous political factions in America: the religious movement that helped fuel the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, as Matthew Taylor wrote in his important new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy,” Wallnau himself was instrumental to the insurrection. “I sorted through hundreds of social media profiles of Christians who were present for the riots and the protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,” Taylor said, “Strikingly, a common denominator you can find across many of those accounts are clips of Wallnau’s Facebook Live rants and links to episodes of ‘Flashpoint’” — a program on a Christian television network called the Victory Channel."... [NY TIMES]

 Read all of it.

 

Tangenitially apropos:
 

 

My TwitterX observation:

Uhhh… “RELIGION,” anyone? Jumps right off the pages, for me. “King,“ “Lord,“ “worship,” “God said,”… etc. anthropomorphism.

Justin Gregg.

 

More to come...

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CRIMINAL NO. 23-cr-257 (TSC): UNITED STATES OF AMERICA vs DONALD J. TRUMP

GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATION

The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role. In Trump v. United States, 144 S. Ct. 2312 (2024), the Supreme Court held that presidents are immune from prosecution for certain official conduct— including the defendant’s use of the Justice Department in furtherance of his scheme, as was alleged in the original indictment—and remanded to this Court to determine whether the remaining allegations against the defendant are immunized. The answer to that question is no.

We shall see, I guess. Unsurprisingly, the Defendant is unhappy.

 

As I post this, the news developments are coming fast and furious.

UPDATE

Jack Smith’s Big New Jan. 6 Brief Is a Major Indictment of the Supreme Court

It’s rare to simultaneously feel red-hot anger and wistfulness, especially when merely reading a document. But those are exactly the emotions that washed over me when I read the redacted version of special counsel Jack Smith’s brief reciting in detail the evidence against Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. The anger is at the Supreme Court for depriving the American people of the chance for a full public airing of Donald Trump’s attempt to use fraud and trickery to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory before voters consider whether to put Trump back in office beginning January 2025. The wistfulness comes with the recognition that there is about an even chance that this will be the last evidence produced by the federal government of this nefarious plot. If Donald Trump wins election next month, the end of this prosecution is certain and the risks of future election subversion heightened...

UPDATE

Click

 FROM JOYCE VANCE WHITE'S SUBSTACK

None of Trump’s interactions with the people listed in the document were made in his role as Chief Executive. Instead, he acted as a candidate grasping at straws, seeking any angle to cling to power. This clarity makes the filing more focused and devastating, particularly as it highlights the involvement of Trump’s campaign staff and personal advisers—figures among the most corrupt and amoral imaginable. 

The document is not only a shocking moral indictment of Trump but an unprecedented window into the fraudulent scheme he spearheaded to maintain power. It exposes Trump’s belief that lies and coercion could resolve any crisis, relying on his subordinates to follow his will without question. What’s remarkable in this filing is how little resistance Trump faced within his inner circle, proving just how far he had ingrained the “stolen election” lie well before the votes were even cast. As alarming as this is, it’s a grim forecast of what may come as Trump continues to sow similar seeds of doubt today...

MOVING ALONG

Paula White was, in many ways, not the first televangelist to get a job in the White House. The first, I would argue, was Donald Trump himself, who had entered the White House two years earlier. In the picture that Paula White paints, Trump has long been an assiduous student of TV preaching, particularly what’s propagated by prosperity preachers and positive thinkers. With his oddly coiffed hair, his formative Norman Vincent Peale theology, his salesmanship, his bombastic oratory, and his unflinching personal schtick forged out of years of celebrity and television savvy, Trump has pantomimed the televangelists. His celebrity could easily mingle with Paula White’s clique of entrepreneurial charismatic celebrities because Trump’s whole brand is made of similar material. For what is “Make America Great Again” if not a gospel? It’s a nationalistic prosperity gospel, to be sure, mixed with a few “American carnage” fire-and-brimstone threats if Trump’s ways are not followed. Coached by Paula White, Trump has now mastered the religious dimension of his own televangelism career, riding evangelical support all the way to the White House.

There was only one official White House-sanctioned prayer offered on the morning of January 6, 2021. It was led by Paula White. On that cold January morning, before Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse telling the lusty crowds to “fight like hell,” before Rudy Giuliani shouted for “trial by combat,” and before the crowds began marching across the National Mall to threaten lawmakers into reneging on American democracy, an invocation from Paula White opened the event.

Let us pray, because God is going to be in today. We believe in miracles...

So let every adversary against democracy, against freedom, against life, against liberty, against justice, against peace, against righteousness be overturned right now in the name of Jesus...

God, we ask right now in conclusion for your provision, for your protection, for your power, for an outpouring of your Spirit like never before. I secure POTUS [President of the United States]. I thank you for President Trump. I thank you that he has stood with Israel; he has stood with life; he has stood for righteousness...

He has walked in your ways. And as you have allowed me to have a relationship with him and his family for twenty years, right now, as his pastor, I put a hedge of protection around him. I secure his purpose. I secure his destiny. I secure his life.

This tenacious, talented, tragic, triumphant woman—someone who has broken every glass ceiling she came up against—became the first pastor to offer an official blessing over an attempted American insurrection.

It’s true that Paula White has built bridges. She built a bridge that allowed her fellow Independent Charismatics to enthusiastically join the inner circle of power within the religious right. She built a bridge across a major divide in American evangelicalism between charismatics and noncharismatics. And she built a bridge between the Independent Charismatic celebrity class and the White House.

These bridges proved strong enough that the leaders of the NAR, and other ambitious charismatic leaders and networks, could link arms with other Christians and Trump advisers in an attempt to overthrow our democracy, all under the banner of Christian unity and revival hope.

Taylor, Matthew D.. The Violent Take It by Force (pp. 47-48). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Also timely, 'eh?

 

I expected I'd to enjoy the book, but thus far I am way more impressed than I'd anticipated. I DM'd the author.

 

I have to do a bit of attitude readjustment with respect to some of these evangelist people.

 

A bit.

Paula in the pink suit.

Again, just a bit.

 

Let Us Prey.
 

I wrote a song about religion once. Long time ago. Has sort of a 3/4 time Loggins & Messina 70’s groove to it.

 

Moving along to the ensuing chapter...

 

Highly recommended read. More to come...

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"What else could go wrong?"

"Don't ask."

   

 

Lake Lure, NC in the wake of Hurricane Helene. That is just jaw-dropping.

Thousands of people still missing across the multistate area impacted by the hurricane.

Other exigent news? Israel vs Hezbollah major regional escalations, U.S. national dockworkers' union strike pending, Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris congenitally "mentally impaired." Disgraced, now-seditious former general Mike Flynn calls the sitting vice president “an enemy of America” with whom "we are at war."

UPDATE

 

More Ellie Pavlick on AI.

Excellent podcast interview (transcript here). Goes to my September 18th post.

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Vote early if you can.

We just did.

We dropped them off ni person this afternoon.

SEPT 26TH UPDATE

40 days to the November 5th elections. Will we have one of more significant "October Surprise(s)?"

• Putin hits UKR nuke plants?
• Israel and Hezbollah throw down all the way, perhaps dragging us in?
• Jack Smith J6 revelations that move the needle?

And so forth. My anxiety will only grow.

Two new Kindle edition resources I just downloaded:

I have long had both in print. Have gotten much use out of the Oxford Dictionary.

 

 

But, the 78+ yr old eyes are getting increasingly bad. I've increasingly purchased Kindle editions of hardcopy books I already have.

 

More in a bit. Gotta go run and pick up Calvin...

I'M BACK

apropos of the prior post—in particular the Ari Berman book Minority Rule—it became clear that my end-to-end familiarity with The Federalist Papers was significantly lacking. Consequently, I will slog attentively through all 544 pages / 85 Volumes of them. I've repeatedly studied the entirety of the U.S. Constitution with great care. Aspects of it were central to my 1998 Ethics & Policy Studies Graduate Thesis (large PDF: judge my cred for yourselves). 

 

Can't say the same about the Federalist Papers. If you're gonna thrust & parry with "originalist" advocates, being well-read in the FP seems warranted. I am remiss in that regard.

Similiarly, I will study every page of the 433 pgs of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

 

Also, re: the prior post, I can see that the "AI Artificial Arguments to Combat Conspiracy Thinking" is gonna require a good bit more close evaluation prior to proffering any conclusions (however tentative). With less than a month and a half to election day, this kind of thing will have no impac anyway. Other exigencies elevate, 'eh?

Off-topic: Just watched S4-E4 of "Slow Horses" on Apple TV+. Wow.

Fixin' to go to bed.

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

"Owning one puts you in a very exclusive Club."

Lordy, Mercy. 

ALSO, FOR YOU LADIES

xoxoxo

 

More to come...

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BREAKING: New at @ScienceMagazine

OK, we're gonna ChatGTP our way out of Gish Gallop BS? Steve Bannon—Mr. Flood-the-MAGA-Zone—didn't get The Memo.
  

 

On deck. Pardon my reflexive dubiety... For one impulse, I reflect on my 2019 post "A Science of Deliberation?" And, "Information Overload and Artificial Intelligence."

Also, a question obtains: Could AI do accurate "Argument Analysis & Evaluation?"

 

 

BACK TO SCIENCE MAGAZINE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs

through dialogues with AI

Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand

ABSTRACT

Conspiracy theory beliefs are notoriously persistent. Influential hypotheses propose that they fulfill important psychological needs, thus resisting counterevidence. Yet previous failures in correcting conspiracy beliefs may be due to counterevidence being insufficiently compelling and tailored. To evaluate this possibility, we leveraged developments in generative artificial intelligence and engaged 2,190 conspiracy believers in personalized evidence-based dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo. The intervention reduced conspiracy belief by ~20%. The effect remained 2 months later, generalized across a wide range of conspiracy theories, and occurred even among participants with deeply entrenched beliefs. Although the dialogues focused on a single conspiracy, they nonetheless diminished belief in unrelated conspiracies and shifted conspiracy-related behavioral intentions. These findings suggest that many conspiracy theory believers can revise their views if presented with sufficiently compelling evidence.

And, oh yeah, "Gish Gallop?"

 

For some AI-related thoughts, I advise Shannon Vallor and Leslie Valiant.

 

    

Stay tuned... 

SEPT 21 UPDATE

There's a lot of detail in the Science Magazine "Artificial Arguments" related articles. Trying to restrain my skepticism until after I've plowed through all of it

apropos of thte pressing political timeline—45 days to the 2024 presidential election—any useful disinfo/ conspiracy-thinking mitigation applications they can sustain via replication will be on a much longer time scale.

I got on to this book this morning via Joyce Vance White's Substack:

Click

Deep into to it. Time is short.

A comment I left at Joyce's post:

Thanks for this. It goes almost verbatim to my long-standing concern about how 2024 may well play out. We are now only 45 days out from the election. I have downloaded Ari’s new book and begun reading it. I encourage everyone else to do it likewise. The prologue alone will blow your mind.
 

Remember that if Trump’s principal focus is denying 270 to throw it to the House, he starts out only needing Supreme Court backing of three justices should a supportive SCOTUS intervention be necessary; he doubtlessly already has Alito and Thomas in the bank. He will of course go through all the melodramatic motions of filing every lame objection in every venue possible just like he did in 2020, but all of that stuff to me is now just requisite sideshow noise. Denying 270 is the last-resort key. IMO it explains his lackluster final approach dilettante campaigning and bizarre ALL CAPS bleatings.

45 days. Ugh.

UPDATE

 

SEPT 25TH UPDATE

I finished Ari Berman's book. An excellent read.

UPDATE, BACK TO THE AI/LLM TOPIC

 

An Atlantic Monthly article led me to Quanta Magazine and to this imposingly bright young scholar:

 and

 

UPenn Phd, Computer & Information Science, Hopkins, Bachelors in ECON and Music Performance (she's a sax player!)

 

Stay tuned. More shortly...

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Offshore Stealth Wealth

Dr. Brooke Harrington's newest book just released.

   

 

Eagerly awaited. Just released. Diving right in.

 

I also thoroughly enjoyed her prior book Capital Without Borders.

 

“He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository.” With these words, Charles Dickens introduces one of his most memorable characters: Mr. Tulkinghorn, the villain of Bleak House. Tulkinghorn is a lawyer specializing in trusts and estates, making him privy to the private lives of Britain’s nobility. A master of legal intricacies, Tulkinghorn’s emotionless, unreadable façade gives him a reputation much prized by his clients for protecting their secrets, as well as their fortunes.

Though he is their employee, Tulkinghorn wields a power that quietly controls the lives of his clients. This distinguishes him from the legion of other professionals and servants in the novel: unlike the family physicians, butlers, and governesses who serve the nobles, Tulkinghorn’s knowledge of the families’ innermost workings makes him their master. Such “inside outsiders” deserve more scrutiny than they have received, given their role in managing large capital flows at the boundary of private family life and the public worlds of law and the market. This is a gap in knowledge that I aspire to fill here.

In a sense, Bleak House can be read as a story of the triumph of professionals over nobles, and of knowledge over wealth. Dickens’ description of Tulkinghorn as the “master of the mysteries of great houses” is reminiscent of what Max Weber once wrote of the court accountants of the Persian shah: they “made a secret doctrine of their budgetary art and even use a secret script” to consolidate their power and ensure the shah’s dependence upon them through obfuscation.3 This is one way of characterizing elite professional work, particularly in the domain now known as “wealth management”—the business of deploying legal and financial expertise to defend the fortunes of high-net-worth individuals and families…

Harrington, Brooke. Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (pp. 1-2). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

OFFSHORE
 

Hmmm... "Offshore?" Ring any bells here? Sam Bankman-Fried, anyone?

 

Brooke has done a ton of fine work. Read some of her related Atlantic Monthly pieces.

The American Con Man Who Pioneered Offshore Finance
How a now-obscure financier turned the Bahamas into a tax haven—and created a cornerstone of global plutocracy

The Broligarchs Are Trying to Have Their Way
The antidemocratic politics of having it all

UPDATE

 

I finished Brooke's book. Excellent. Very engaging. Let me leave you with this for now.

More to come...

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