Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
I don't know about you guys, but I thought it was fairly common knowledge that we are being manipulated by various different groups. I also thought that most people can recognise when and how they are being manipulated by advertising or whatever. Personally, at school, I was taught how to identify techniques used to influence viewer or reader responses in advertising, documentaries, feature articles, and other forms of media. For example I was taught how to spot techniques such as selection of detail in expository texts, I was taught how to spot phrases such as "leading expert" "world community" and "possibly billions of lives" (as an example taken from Moozooh's post above) and be able to identify what they are trying to achieve in the context of an article. These are some of the things I learned in my regular high school education. Undoubtedly, most of you guys know this stuff too.
EDIT: Pirate_Sephiroth is right in this respect. Expository texts carefully construct "experts" to seem more plausible than regular people off the street. They don't even have to be important for an audience to believe them. the next time you watch a current affairs program, look out for this. It's blindingly obvious once you've seen it the first time.
Also, I'd like to note that sometimes, the media presents experts so that we assume the experts believe in opinion A, when in reality, they believe in opinion B. So in reality, the expert, or person of authority doesn't even need to say something in order for the audience to believe it. I wanted to say this because it means that people of authority sometimes don't get their own way either :P
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
I have always wondered why so many people oppose so strongly the very idea of global warming and climate change. They propose that it's just a big hoax, a conspiracy, we are being lied to...
Yeah, the idea that global warming is a hoax is completely absurd, but even more crazy is the idea that scientists "who just want to keep being paid" are "behind it".
What's even worse is that these people seem incapable of recognizing that there's a huge financial incentive by large energy companies (among others) to ensure that there never is a comprehensive policy to combat climate change. It should come as no surprise that the largest and richest companies in the world would fund their own research that is usually a lot more ambivalent about the whole thing.
It's also clear to see that most of the political opposition against climate change legislation is in the right-wing corner. You know. The guys who want to increase the gap between rich and poor and deconstruct the social welfare state. The guys whose campaigns are funded by these companies. (Not that all is well in left-wing politics either. There are numerous left-wing politicians who have lent themselves to this kind of despicable special interest lobby.)
ps:
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
ok here's evidence for you
(image)
This is not exactly the best way to get your point across.
Public awareness of the subtle manipulation techniques used in the media is increasing. As we are becoming more technologically savvy, people are turning more to alternate media outlets, and realising that the mainstream media is not the most reliable source for the news. This is shown with the recent and growing drop in newspaper sales of the established media outlets. The internet is still a huge growing force in informing people about information, and it is possible to easily find many peer-reviewed scientific papers online and read them for yourself, rather than having a journalist interpret that for you, with the natural bias, omission and spin that seems to come from the mainstream media.
As for the expansion of the idea of critical thinking, it is something I like to challenge myself with. I was taught ways to think from the opposite point of view of what I genuinely support or believe myself, and I use that a lot today to challenge and either reinforce or re-evaluate my own beliefs and opinions on matters. I like a healthy debate, and this ability is great in making real debate happen. I sometimes do take on the role of 'devil's advocate', not necessarily because I support something, but to get a debate and better understanding of the opposite point of view.
Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
What's even worse is that these people seem incapable of recognizing that there's a huge financial incentive by large energy companies (among others) to ensure that there never is a comprehensive policy to combat climate change.
Ad hominem circumstantial points out that someone is in circumstances such that he is disposed to take a particular position. Ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a source. This is fallacious because a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false
I got this from wikipedia (sue me). You seem to have fallen into the trap of ad hominem. So did all these people who believe that scientists are being paid to create a climate change hoax. Let's just say that in a theoretical world, billions of jobs depend on the belief that climate change is real. Now let's say that these people will actively defend climate change to keep their jobs. They will always say that climate change is real whether or not it really is in this fictional world. However, because their claims are independent of climate change, their claims that climate change is real cannot be used as evidence for either side of the argument. In reality, Climate change doesn't give a shit whether or not you believe in it. It's there or it isn't, and whether people have interests in believing it is irrelevant to whether it exists.
I don't know about you guys, but I thought it was fairly common knowledge that we are being manipulated by various different groups. I also thought that most people can recognise when and how they are being manipulated by advertising or whatever. Personally, at school, I was taught how to identify techniques used to influence viewer or reader responses in advertising, documentaries, feature articles, and other forms of media. For example I was taught how to spot techniques such as selection of detail in expository texts, I was taught how to spot phrases such as "leading expert" "world community" and "possibly billions of lives" (as an example taken from Moozooh's post above) and be able to identify what they are trying to achieve in the context of an article. These are some of the things I learned in my regular high school education. Undoubtedly, most of you guys know this stuff too.
Well, the exact same goes for all the conspiracy theorists too (yes, including those who claim that we are being manipulated by the government, the media and the scientific community). They will use all the tricks in the book (including deliberate and wilful deceit) to try to convince people that their conspiracy theory is legit.
The major problem is not really the people who try to deceive other people. The major problem is that those other people seldom do the proper research, and will believe anything that is presented in a sufficiently convincing manner.
Man, rhebus, you're really trying to make me write an essay or something. :D
rhebus wrote:
Do you really think anyone, expert or not, can be certain in advance which diseases will mutate into global pandemics killing millions and which will not? Nobody knows which diseases will mutate into virulent strains. We only know that there are some which could. That's why no expert said bird flu would kill millions, only that it had potential to.
Let me point out that, at the time the article was published (late 2003):
1) the amount of people who contracted the disease was less than a dozen, not all of which died;
2) no details were provided about sanitary conditions, genetics, immunity states, or particular circumstances of those people contracting the disease;
3) no details were provided about their treatment or the illness history.
They just contracted it and died, that's it. You're free to draw any conclusions you like. Now for some quote hilarity, starting with this press-conference from 2005.
Health experts agreed that the long period of time since the last serious flu epidemic, which had killed tens of millions of people in 1918-1919, meant the world was overdue for another epidemic. “In the natural history of these things, I am almost certain that there will be another pandemic soon.”
Why are you almost certain? Because general health care and personal/industrial hygiene is the same as 80 years ago? Because the virus targets mainly the same demographic as back then (hint: not by a long shot)? And how shameless (or sick in the head) do you need to be to use the term "overdue" in this context?
These guys exercised a position of authority right there, with regards to pretending to know better. Whether they did know better or not, you are not given a means to judge, you just have to trust whatever vague claims you hear because that's all you hear.
“I’m not, at the moment, at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million.”
You may not realize it at first, but this "to 150 million" is a pathologically obscene number in the order of anthrax (present-day mortality rate >50%, kills untreated victim in less than a week) victims in late XIV century. He "let's says" it without providing any details whatsoever. You just don't "let's say" things like that. If you extrapolate millions from several dozen over ~1.5 years, you better take responsibility for the potential panic of people who don't know what you know. And he knew that by that time less than a hundred people contracted the disease, of which less than a half died, and all of that happened in countries with very poor general sanitary conditions. A conclusion I could draw from that is that on a personal level the disease could be dealt with by means of immunity system and general treatment even in those countries, let alone First World ones, but that much he didn't tell. Instead of calming people down he riled them up. Let's say that was a very douchebag move — but that's UN for you. The body of evidence of them fucking things up all over the globe is by this point overwhelming, but that's another topic.
Now you may notice the ratio of big claims and secrecy (as in "we know more than you do, but we aren't in a position to tell you") to openness about the small details and particulars, but hypocrisy didn't particularly stop there.
"The United States is collaborating closely with eight international organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and 88 foreign governments to address the situation through planning, greater monitoring, and full transparency in reporting and investigating avian influenza occurrences.
That full transparency part is not for you. You don't get full transparency or the means to judge it, what you get instead is seeing birds burned alive on the tv served as an active prevention measure whose efficacy is at best dubious if we were to believe the information from the same sources that the virus could be, and was, spread further by wild birds who realistically couldn't be randomly thrown in a fire. Obviously you can't estimate the efficacy after you burn the birds because there's no way to tell if they were contagious or if somebody would have contracted the disease from them. So what else there is to do? Right, speculate:
As it was, only six people died—and all of them had contracted the virus from chickens sold in Hong Kong poultry markets. The only thing that saved us was the quick thinking of scientists who convinced health authorities to slaughter more than a million domesticated fowl in the city's markets.
Btw, that's the exact article that started the hysteria. I can't find the complete version freely available anywhere (even Wikipedia has a dead link to the original site), so let's return to the UN officials' claims.
Officials wanted to minimize the effect of a pandemic on people’s health, as well as on trade, travel and the economy.
Or did they? By fueling the mass hysteria surrounding the epidemic, they achieved exactly the opposite effect.
To provide you with some data for comparison, here's more statistics:
The annual flu (also called "seasonal flu" or "human flu") in the U.S. "results in approximately 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations each year. In addition to this human toll, influenza is annually responsible for a total cost of over $10 billion in the U.S."
That's US alone, correct. Bird flu was nothing compared to seasonal flu (literally: nobody contracted it in the US), the evidence was already there in 2006, yet people were still led to believe they're enduring a most dangerous pandemic since the early XX century and UN&Co are doing everything in their might to prevent it. They're heroes, they don't need to apologize for the panic they created themselves. Neither do pharmacies who started offering new medicines at a high price point, whose effectiveness against bird flu was impeccable considering the target audience had a zero chance of actually contracting it anyway. Neither do governments who provided pharmacies with a free (?) advertising substrate in the form of PSAs and similar measures aimed at reminding people of the imminent danger of bird flu (yeah, we had banners on the streets dedicated to that shit).
Interesting that SARS, which was a far more palpable danger, was not only dealt with a lot more effectively (less than half a year to complete containment) and with less media circlejerk with potential death estimates, it was quite quickly forgotten, too, for some reason. And that also was a virus with unknown origin with no vaccine existing before discovery, it spread faster and killed more people in 7 weeks than H5N1 did in 7 years. If I were to speculate, I'd say it was because milking it was way too hard and dangerous, especially when compared to a pathetically slow-moving disease like bird flu that only kills citizens of the Third World countries who have a direct contact with sneezing chicken. It wouldn't surprise me if curbing SARS required funding in orders of magnitude less than those invested in bird flu, too.
rhebus wrote:
Let me pose a simplified model to you. If disease X has a five in six chance of killing only 150 people, but a one in six chance of killing 150 million people, what would you do? Would you spend no money, risking 2% of the world's population to a dice roll, safe that it will "probably be fine"? Would you spend money trying to save lives, knowing that there was a 5 in 6 chance the money would be wasted since the disease wouldn't spread anyway? Personally, I would spend the money. The expectation for the number of deaths is 25 million, even though the most likely outcome is 150 deaths.
Excellent, now where would that money be taken from, what actions will I take, and how will I go about communicating about this with the public? Your simplified model is so simplified it omits that entirely, but this is the main point of my criticism. Jumping on rails in front of a moving train has a mortality rate higher than any virus known to date, is very popular in Asia, unpredictable, and potentially contagious because onlookers and the mentally unstable may get a wrong idea. Now I have enough prerequisites for a pandemic I'll report as targeting anywhere from, let's say, 1 to 8 billion people, for which I'm going to take inordinate amount of funding and come to no definitive conclusion. The UN way.™
So yeah, back to my options as a citizen who doesn't want to get ill. As such I've been mainly told to take Arbidol™ by the people in the tv and people who watch tv. Others said I should take vitamins and lead a healthy lifestyle in general so that flu wouldn't take me down. The second option is arguably cheaper and more universally useful (flu doesn't have a cure and doesn't explicitly require vaccination, so either way your personal immunity system is the main player in this game), but somehow it's not promoted as actively, even though any government should be interested in healthy population enough to sponsor that out of a federal budget.
So, I need to exercise my critical thinking by challenging the notion of the pandemic hysteria being artificially constructed with existing stakeholders. Quotes and statistics above gave me the notion, nothing you told me so far, aside from a model too simplistic to serve a useful example, actually disputed it.
As andymac said, it's not a big secret that we're being manipulated every day (hell, I spent five years studying advertising only to realize most of these people really have no shame), the key is to become better equipped to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
The biggest factor in these manipulation techniques is playing on the natural fears of the population. We are by nature a fearful species, but that's served us well when we had predators to contend with - the surviving population is descended from the twitchiest of the nervous twitchers which survived our days as prey. So, on an instinctive level, we have a natural and healthy fear factor left over from those primeval days in our evolution.
A lot of the media influence comes from either generating fear or exaggerating people's natural concerns. The hysteria over H5N1, or even later the H1N1 scare is a classic example of this fear being used to manipulate people into behaving in a desired manner.
In the US televisions, the advertising of pharmaceuticals is pretty shocking compared to what I as a UK citizen is used to. I have seen some of these adverts, and they seem to consist of the following:
Fearmongering about a particular illness or disease
Promoting the pharmaceutical as a solution;
but then is followed by a list of side-effects of the drugs that is worse than the illness it seeks to treat, and tends to take up the majority of the actual advert. I wonder how many of us have actually stopped to listen to one of these adverts in their entirely and thought 'I think I'll take my chances, the side-effects sound much worse.' Its interesting how people react when given two sources of fearmongering; they tend to react to the one that is presented first more than the one that is presented second: in this case, the fear over a particular disease, rather than the side effects of the proposed solution.
A lot of the media influence comes from either generating fear or exaggerating people's natural concerns. The hysteria over H5N1, or even later the H1N1 scare is a classic example of this fear being used to manipulate people into behaving in a desired manner.
Just because some unscrupulous people take advantage of a potential catastrophe for their own benefit doesn't necessarily mean that the original concerns are invalid and invented out of malice and greed.
Likewise if the catastrophe didn't happen after all, it doesn't mean that the concerns were not valid and the possibility of a catastrophe real.
You don't put railings on ledges because else people will inevitably fall. You put them because someone might fall, and averting the risk is worth the effort.
I'm in agreement with all of that, Warp. However, the exaggeration of the risk is the real problem, which while there is genuine concern about something like animal flus, the worst case scenario seems to be the one that is publicly presented.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
andymac wrote:
What's even worse is that these people seem incapable of recognizing that there's a huge financial incentive by large energy companies (among others) to ensure that there never is a comprehensive policy to combat climate change.
Ad hominem circumstantial points out that someone is in circumstances such that he is disposed to take a particular position. Ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a source. This is fallacious because a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false
I got this from wikipedia (sue me). You seem to have fallen into the trap of ad hominem.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? What I said is that there's a financial incentive to seed misinformation about climate change, which there is. I didn't say that anyone, or any researcher, is necessarily wrong because of their affiliations. (Because I don't believe they are.) Nor am I trying to discredit anyone's opinions, analysis or research based on any affiliation. That would indeed be very wrong.
What I did say, however, is that some researchers and politicians are affiliated with, or otherwise funded or supported by companies that have a financial stake in lax energy or climate change regulations, and that we should be skeptical of such dependence. Especially when corporate bias in scientific papers, especially with regard to climate science, is very real and well-documented. It has happened in the past and will happen in the future. The spread of misinformation from special interest groups is both very real and very dangerous to the ongoing effort to educate the public about this. That's why you'll want to get your information from independent researchers that don't get paid by a boss who would prefer that they arrive at a conclusion that's beneficial to his interests.
But again, I'm not saying all research coming from a particular source, person or group is necessarily flawed. Just that there is a well known bias that you should be wary of. I also believe that people who oppose climate change legislation have a tendency to be indifferent or sometimes even supportive of this bias, claiming that we're better off trusting corporate research than government- or NGO-funded research, and that's a seriously misguided conviction.
andymac wrote:
Climate change doesn't give a shit whether or not you believe in it. It's there or it isn't, and whether people have interests in believing it is irrelevant to whether it exists.
moozooh, I don't know where you're getting your official advice. Advice here in the UK about bird flu and swine flu - that is, official government advice as well as advice from university scientists in an official or unofficial capacity - was basically "to prevent spread of bird flu: practise good hygiene, isolate known and suspected cases, and otherwise go about your life normally." Drugs were not recommended by the public authorities and university experts. The media did stir up a hysteria and a panic stockpiling of Tamiflu, but government and university experts alike requested people not to so that those actually suffering would be able to get treatment. Arbidol is not approved for use in Western countries, so we didn't get any of that pushed on us.
Perhaps things are completely different in Russia, but as far as what the university and government experts here recommended with respect to bird and swine flu, I haven't found their advice to be inconvenient or personally expensive.
Well, I'm happy for UK, because things sure weren't remotely as consistent here. When you see one interview contradicting another interview heard but an hour ago, and there being no universally good way of carrying on (like the one you mentioned) being promoted regularly by government officials, it becomes a chaos of ignorance with greedy people jumping on it like marauders. :(
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I get a flu shot every year, paid for by the government because I'm in a risk group for flu complications. For the Avian Flu I got one extra shot. That still makes sense to me simply because some people who get the flu, any flu, have a higher likelihood to develop potentially fatal conditions like pneumonia as a result. That's just a regular consequence of the flu.
The hysteria was unfounded, however. It was really just a slightly different flu.
there's a financial incentive to seed misinformation about climate change
Like what? And even if there is, is it the best possible financial course of action? People wanting to make money want to maximize profits, and a scheme that does not maximize profits is foolish. Why would someone promote a program which might bring a moderate amount of money, when the complete opposite program would bring a whole lot more money?
It still sounds to me that even if there's something to profit from the climate change, that's not the original source and reason for the claim, because it's a relatively poor way of getting profit. Hence if someone is attempting to profit from it, he's simply taking advantage of the phenomenon, rather than starting it.
Misinformation → belief that things that have taken place until currently are not right →
1) tapping into the budget to do things "right" → pretending to fix the problem (which either doesn't exist, or is completely different to what is claimed) → laundering money;
2) setting up a business scheme designed around "fixing" the "problem" → pretending to fix the problem (usually with a solution that is in no way more effective than the rest, yet is implied to be better) → raking in profits.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
Dada wrote:
there's a financial incentive to seed misinformation about climate change
Like what?
Like the idea that climate change is not real. That it doesn't exist. Or, as has become the case in recent years, that it is real but that it's not our fault. And that we cannot do anything against it.
I don't entirely get the rest of your post. Are you suggesting that it is not in the interest of large, multinational energy companies to prevent the forming of legislation that would force them to start moving away from their beloved cash cows (fossil fuels, for one)?
And for the record, I'm talking about the financial incentive to prevent climate change legislation. There is nothing to gain from climate change itself in any form, nor was I suggesting that.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
more lulz (you wish)
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=237184&page=5
or maybe you think it's just a concidence that its most recent versions blocks known debuggers and monitoring tools and have also been protected with themida...
SEEMS LEGIT!
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
SEEMS LEGIT!
:)
