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Suppose that you notice that on average, green shows up twice as often as red, but you can’t see a pattern to it. If you want to maximise your winnings, should you on average bet on green twice as often as red to match the frequencies you’re seeing? No, you should strictly bet on green every time.
(Anyone know where I might have read about this before? Pretty sure it’s somewhere on LW, but I can’t find it.)
Similarly, if a random black person is statistically more likely to be a criminal than a white person, then a police officer’s or prosecutor’s career incentive is to focus on them.
This analogy would work if there was only one cop. However, if all the other cops are only looking for black criminals, you will have a much easier time finding white criminals because no other cops are looking there. The equilibrium distribution is that cops look for white and black criminals in proportion to their criminality.
A certain percentage of Americans are racists.
What do you mean by "racist"? Is someone who, correctly, believes that blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites "racist". What about someone who's internalized this true belief?
Per your ad-hominem attacks, I now perceive you as a troll
So you admit that your motivated perception is more important than reality.
Your linked definition of 'post-truth' is:
relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief
Note, the implicit inference that such circumstances are more common now than in the past, when this is almost certainly not true.
Rather, it's intended to side-step the former temporarily, while still being useful by creating better frameworks for deliberation, mediation and similar good practices
The problem is that it's frequently used as an attempt to reach conclusions while side-stepping the whole messy "looking at the facts on the ground" thing.
"I disagree with X and took it to PMs" to avoid giving the impression that his assertion was unchallenged.
What would be the point of that. To convince the other guy to see his mistakes? That only works if the person you're debating is well meaning and exceptionally rational.
Otherwise, the point of debating in public is so that observers can see for themselves who's being rational.
but even if he wasn't I would still attack his arguments rather than attack the man.
Didn't you also just say you don't want object level political discussions?
I wouldn't go ad-hominem against Gleb_Tsipursky
Well, right here I'm not debating Gleb, I'm debating you.
He seems to me to be an earnest debater with a lot to offer
Really, to me he looks like a standard cargo cult rationalist of the kind that Rational Wiki is full of.
I think the real problem here is that the pejorative term "Fake news" is succumbing to an effect I mentioned down in the comments earlier.
"succumbing"? It succumbed to that effect decades ago.
Attempting to "rise above" object level discussion does not get you closer to truth. It means the conversation gets dominated by charlatans like Gab.
In particular, you're not interested in reaching the voters who don't want say Muslim migrants raping and occasionally murdering girls in their neighborhoods. Good to know.
I would like to caution commenters that it seems to me like the comment section of this post is at risk of becoming an object-level political argument of the sort specifically proscribed by the rules.
And the (false) object level political statements in the OP aren't proscribed by the rules?
Can you be comfortable saying that Trump lies more often, and more intensely, than prominent liberal politicians
I'm not sure about The_Jaded_One, he seems to be willing to assert false things under peer pressure. However, that statement is in fact false. Where by "false" I mean it doesn't correspond to mapping to external observable reality. Specifically, I mean that Trump's statements tend to map to reality better than those of liberal politicians.
I am comfortable with saying that my post is anti-post truth politics. I think most LWs would agree that Trump relies more on post-truth tactics than other politicians.
Are you comfortable providing actual evidence for the claim that "Trump relies more on post-truth tactics than other politicians" or are you trying to argue for an epistemology of truth based on whatever the consensus by "experts" is?
Washington Post and The New York Times - do you call them fake news as well?
Yes, as I mentioned in my other comment. Now care to explain why you cited them in an article supposedly devoted to opposing fake news. Or is your definition of "fake news", news that contradicts something written in an "official true news source" as opposed to something that contradicts reality?
Men have a "higher propensity to commit crimes" compared to women, and we don't call them "objectively bad" for this.
On the other hand we do have a "violence against women" act, and a whole section of the justice department dedicated to crimes committed by men against women.
Or another example, suppose you belief that Global Warming is a hoax but questioning the word of certified expert scientists(tm) is not allowed in your social circle, so you come up with an elaborate meta-political explanation for why one can support the people calling Global Warming a hoax without believing it.
It's probably counterproductive to discuss object level politics.
So how do you propose to make politics more rational and better correspond to truth without discussing which policies are in fact rational and which political statements are true?
I think it suffices to say that Gleb_Tsipursky has something of an anti-Trump political angle in the post (which may or may not be objectively correct), and agree to disagree as much as is possible on the object level.
And yet he claimed his project is "non-partisan".
After all, conservatives have relied much more (1, 2, 3) on lies
The fact that your siting fake news sites like politifact when describing this project does not bode well for it.
Such information often comes from the quickly-growing number of fake news sources.
Um, fake news sources, like the New York Times have existed for at least a century and probably for as long as news existed. If anything is different in 2016 it's that it's becoming easier to check them and find out that their false.
Without intervention, these outcomes will most likely grow worse over time, as future politicians learn from the results of the 2016 election season and double down on this strategy of lies and manipulation.
Um, the candidate of lies and manipulation lost.
In this case, the commonly-shared resource is trust in our political system and a basic expectation of truth-telling, together with a strong expectation that politicians will back away from lies when called out. We have seen this resource gobbled up in the 2016 election season by the Trump campaign.
Um, I thick your confused here. It was the Clinton campaign that was doing things like encouraging BLM with misleading statistics and outright lies.
In particular, as most people will know, "rationalism" in politics has some unfortunate connotations of ivory-tower over-intellectualism and disregard for most real-world issues and dynamics. Avoiding this impression, however misguided in this particular case,
Is it in fact misguided? Certainly looking at the OP the impression appears to be correct.