I think there’s a simpler explanation which is not mentioned in the post: the set of object-level facts mentioned in both narratives can be literally correct, and the narratives have approximately zero added epistemic value on top of that.
This works because of selection bias. If you have a robot toss a fair coin 1000 times and you care about whether there are more heads than tails or vice versa, and there are two people who can reveal to you 100 coins each with the goal of convincing you of one result or the other, it’s obvious what will happen: the heads guy will reveal 100 heads, the tails guy will reveal 100 tails, and you’ll be no closer to the truth than you were before.
This is almost always the case in the real world because the number of yes/no questions (something like Kolmogorov complexity in this setting) that you need to characterize a situation is always vastly larger than the number that people can actually process on a case-by-case basis, especially if the parties are pushing disinformation to pollute all the relevant information channels (which they will be doing). The result is that anyone can find many factoids to support their position and none of them need to be lying.
In this case a lot of what are claimed as object-level facts are directly contradictory, but I like this point (and the way you made it) overall. If I quote you in the future elsewhere (e.g. FB or other essays) would you prefer that I paraphrase or copy-paste, and would you prefer attribution or anonymity?
Yeah, I agree in this case there are some contradictory claims but I don’t think they matter that much overall. That’s because I think the line between lying and deception is not that sharp and there’s an intuitively compelling sense in which the people revealing to you 100 heads or 100 tails out of 510 heads in 1000 tosses are “lying”, or at least “being deceptive”. That’s the bigger problem, and the fact that they might mix this up with conflicting claims about e.g. whether the 758th coin came up heads or tails is in my opinion not too important.
As for quoting me, you can do that whenever you want and however you want. You can attribute it to me or not, you can paraphrase it or not, et cetera. Totally up to you.
I think there’s a simpler explanation which is not mentioned in the post: the set of object-level facts mentioned in both narratives can be literally correct, and the narratives have approximately zero added epistemic value on top of that.
This works because of selection bias. If you have a robot toss a fair coin 1000 times and you care about whether there are more heads than tails or vice versa, and there are two people who can reveal to you 100 coins each with the goal of convincing you of one result or the other, it’s obvious what will happen: the heads guy will reveal 100 heads, the tails guy will reveal 100 tails, and you’ll be no closer to the truth than you were before.
This is almost always the case in the real world because the number of yes/no questions (something like Kolmogorov complexity in this setting) that you need to characterize a situation is always vastly larger than the number that people can actually process on a case-by-case basis, especially if the parties are pushing disinformation to pollute all the relevant information channels (which they will be doing). The result is that anyone can find many factoids to support their position and none of them need to be lying.
In this case a lot of what are claimed as object-level facts are directly contradictory, but I like this point (and the way you made it) overall. If I quote you in the future elsewhere (e.g. FB or other essays) would you prefer that I paraphrase or copy-paste, and would you prefer attribution or anonymity?
Yeah, I agree in this case there are some contradictory claims but I don’t think they matter that much overall. That’s because I think the line between lying and deception is not that sharp and there’s an intuitively compelling sense in which the people revealing to you 100 heads or 100 tails out of 510 heads in 1000 tosses are “lying”, or at least “being deceptive”. That’s the bigger problem, and the fact that they might mix this up with conflicting claims about e.g. whether the 758th coin came up heads or tails is in my opinion not too important.
As for quoting me, you can do that whenever you want and however you want. You can attribute it to me or not, you can paraphrase it or not, et cetera. Totally up to you.
Agree.
And nice summary. Do you know if there is a writeup of an explanation like that somewhere that I can refer to (except of course your comment)?