Another Lament about Fake News

Several years ago, I distrusted the phrase "fake news." It was often uttered by Donald Trump, for whom I have almost no respect.

I’m convinced that the great majority of us act rationally based upon the information to which we expose ourselves. If we are exposing ourselves only to false information, however, we will believe and act “rationally” based on that false information. Once upon a time, I heavily relied upon NYT/WP/NPR/MSNBC, but am no longer able to freely trust these sources. These are big organizations with high-paid reporters, editors and purported fact-checkers. Over the past few years, despite all of this high-paid talent, I have seen each of these organizations blatantly and proudly trumpet false information. I’m not claiming that everything these outlets publish is false. Far from it. They are all big tents and they all publish many excellent articles. That said, they have failed so thoroughly and dramatically on so many high-profile stories in the past few years (including basic facts concerning Kyle Rittenhouse and Russiagate) that I have reset my default setting to “Suspicious” on their high-profile news stories, especially when the story could effect a national election.

And not only have each of these outlets published steady streams of false stories, each of them has intentionally suppressed important stories that run counter to their chosen narratives. Some of the biggest lies are told by writing statements that are completely true while simultaneously suppressing evidence that will put these “true” facts into a completely different frame (e.g., following the death of George Floyd, the above outlets refused to publish Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer’s 2019 statistical analysis on police shootings (Discussed by Sam Harris here), statistics that run counter some of the main narratives of the “defund the police” crowd. This is my introduction to Andrew Sullivan’s recent article, “When all the Media Narratives Collapse: In case after case, the US MSM just keep getting it wrong.” I have expanded on Sullivan’s article with my own.

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WP: Now that We Think About it . . . There’s No Evidence that Rittenhouse was a White Supremicist

The WP apparently trying to mitigate damages in the libel suit they are now apparently worrying about. Responsible professional journalism would have been evidence-based from the very beginning. I probably need to add that I'm no fan of Kyle Rittenhouse. He is not any sort of hero to me. I write this as someone who has seen the widespread decline in the the ability of legacy news outlets that I formerly trusted.

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Niall Ferguson Explains Why He is Helping to Create a New College

Niall Ferguson's article at Bloomberg is titled, "I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken: Institutions dedicated to the search for truth have ossified into havens for liberal intolerance and administrative overreach."

In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.

Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.

. . . . The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges.

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About Counterweight

It's time to take back the word "liberal" from a relatively small number of loud boorish illiberal people who happen to be strategically placed in our sense-making institutions. Counterweight, founded by Helen Pluckrose, is there to help you.

Helen Pluckrose:

When I say that attaching social or moral significance to ‘race’ is bad, I am told that this attitude will make me blind to racism. That makes no sense. Racism is the worst form of attaching social & moral significance to race which is the very thing I oppose.

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The Problems with Being Too Honest

Michael Leviton has written quite a thought-provoking article. He was raised to be too honest and when he encounter the real world as an adult, he found that it kept him from getting hired and made romance impossible. He discovered that he needed to be less honest, but how? Here's an excerpt from "What I Learned About Love When I Stopped Being Honest."

There were no support groups for people who wanted to be less honest. Therapists advised people to speak their truth, not to shut up for once. Whatever advice everybody else needed, I needed the opposite. So I came up with my own system, made myself lists of subjects that I’d no longer discuss and various rules for myself, such as:

Hide your feelings and observations.

Instead of searching for people who will appreciate who you really are, try to be what the person in front of you wants. Learn to make small talk.

Do NOT be yourself.

This felt both stupid and impossible. My brain had been built to be honest. I couldn’t even answer “How are you?” with “Fine” without feeling ill.

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