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Fighting Misinformation or Fighting for Information? (hks.harvard.edu)
5 points by harscoat on Jan 12, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



The article argues that more efforts should be put into making the public accept "reliable" information instead of spending said resources in fighting "mis-information".

Their 2 parameter toy model certainly does not warrant any general interpretation of its results. And even posing such dichotomy as a problem from the real world is either sad or silly, depending on the psychological dispositions whoever makes the judgement.

I suppose every true student of world affairs, able to communicate with persons from diverse cultures and nations on a given political topic soon finds that there is a spectrum of opinions on the same mix and twist of the few immutable facts woven into narratives. The official narrative is just a point in this space, and depends on a given time and to which political overarching narrative it belongs. Official narratives must not be taken as "reliable" by default. In this age when political marketing is the alfa/omega of algorithmic development, info-wars are waged against other nations, sometimes even against own citizens, it is a irresponsible to cajole people into dichotomies that imply existence of some "reliable" and "unreliable" sources of information (and pretend 2 parameter model has anything to say on this matter). Most of the time there is just no way to sample information anywhere near the "truth".




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