Truth Dealers

I sell to leftists and rightists.
I'd sell to independents but they're not the most regular customers.

There will always be war and politics. Just as the ready availability of weapons escalates and prolongs wars, the ready availability of information escalates and prolongs political battles.

As the 2012 U.S. election season draws to a close, there have been many possible reasons proffered for why this one seems to have been particularly, historically divisive. The battle lines between Democrats and Republicans have grown deeper, wider, and more extensive than for any other election — at least any I can remember. This, despite the facts that, 1) the two parties have nearly identical ideologies, and, 2) most voters do not fully support the published platforms of either party.

One of the reasons I've heard suggested to explain this latest battle in the ideological war that began, really, back in the photo-finish election of 2000, is that we have somehow lost our respect for the truth. He who tells the biggest whopper gets the most votes. In The Truth and Nothing But...A Good Story, I wrote about how partisan lies often spread like wildfire through the Internet, propagated by people who are either too lazy to check the validity of the facts, or too cynical to care. In the latter days of the campaigns, this overt dishonesty isn't limited to the Internet, with TV and radio ads now claiming things that are blatantly, provably, unequivocally false.

What's more maddening, nobody ever seems to want to retract these lies once they're caught. The phenomena of "doubling down" and "tripling down, basically repeating the original lie louder and to a broader audience, has become epidemic. Why? Because it works! And here's how...

Think of political operatives as carnival barkers. Their job is to draw attention to a certain set of facts that favor their candidate. But the facts themselves may be dry and boring without some dramatic context. "See the man with no stomach!" they scream. The actual fact is, there's a skinny guy who can suck in his gut to the point where his spine is visible from the front, still worth the price of admission perhaps (if you're interested in such oddities), just not as catchy and seductive as the shouted hook would have you believe. Some customers, after viewing the side-show, may complain about the lie, pointing out the original claim was misleading and blatantly, provably, unequivocally false. "Pants on fire!" they exclaim. But who cares? They have witnessed something they probably wouldn't have seen otherwise, and the carnival has their $1 so everybody's happy. Meanwhile, the barker continues to shout even louder, "See the man with no stomach!"

Even carnival barkers have legal restrictions that prevent them going too far in making false claims and false implications. Under certain circumstances, their utterances can be considered to be advertising, which is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission and by similar state agencies. Under penalty of law, advertisers are not allowed to make false claims, or even misleading ones, about their products or their competitor's. The FTC defines false advertising to include the following:

means of advertisement [...] which is misleading in a material respect; and in determining whether an advertisement is misleading, there shall be taken into account (among other things) not only representations made or suggested [...] but also the extent to which the advertisement fails to reveal facts material in the light of such representations.

See the Mormon with no heart!
Marvel at the Kenyan who fooled the world!

In this campaign cycle, there have been many, many political ads, including the one linked above, that clearly would have violated FTC laws if the product being sold had been, say, soap instead of a candidate for political office. Why do we hold carnival barkers and purveyors of dish soaps to a higher standard of honesty than our presidential candidates? The answer is, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. The courts have held that political ads cannot be considered to be advertising. They are political speech, which is protected under the First Amendment. As a result, it is legal for anyone to tell any political lie, however outrageous, as loudly and often as they wish.

And, honestly, how else could it work? We certainly don't want the government telling us which political claims we should believe and which ones we should discount. The problem is really a practical one stemming, ironically, from the success the FTC has had in their enforcement of truth in advertising. I've heard people say things like, "There must be some truth in that political ad, otherwise they wouldn't let it be shown on TV." This "nanny expectation" is completely unfounded when it comes to the strange world of political advertising and no comfort whatsoever can be drawn from it. (Interestingly, the truth-in-advertising expectation does not seem to extend to the Internet, even though the same FTC laws apply there as on traditional broadcast media.)

Legally, practically, and in every other sense, it is the responsibility of each individual voter in the U.S. to research campaign ads they may find compelling to discover whether they are indeed truthful; a daunting task. The only reasonable alternative is to rely on a trusted source to do the fact checking for you. There are now legions of so-called fact checkers, and nearly every claim made by every major political candidate is combed over, investigated, parsed and re-parsed to try to determine whether it is true, false, or somewhere in between. Campaigns often shoot for that middle ground, the grey area where claims can still be sensational, provocative, even mildly misleading, without actually being so blatantly false as to reflect poorly on the candidate's public character and facade of honesty. They seem to follow some sage advice I received early in life.

How does one become a good liar?
Tell the truth almost always.

The truth is a fluid and relative thing these days. It depends on whom one chooses to believe. Even things we once called "facts", things like, "this person was born in the U.S.," or, "this person is a Christian," or, "this person never cheated on his taxes," all are now written in various shades of grey. It's not that we treasure the truth any less than before; if anything, just the opposite is the case due to increased skepticism. It's not that there are too few facts; the Internet, among other things, now provides a treasure trove of information about every conceivable topic.

The challenge, IMO, is that there are so many facts, so much information available to each of us. Facts are weapons in the political wars that currently rage in this country, and fact checkers are the arms dealers who make money selling to both sides of the conflict. Like weapons, there are high-quality facts and low-quality ones. Facts purchased from the "fact checkers" at Fox News or MSNBC are somewhat more likely to jam on you in the heat of battle or blow up in your face like a crude IED. But these aren't the really dangerous ones. The reputable arms dealers, the neutral fact checkers and think tanks sell large quantities of durable, usable information to either side for a price. In political skirmishes these days, you cannot be lulled into a false feeling of security because you are armed with the facts. The other guys are probably packing heat as well, just as much as you and maybe more. Standing up to declare victory because truth is on your side is a sure way to become a bloody casualty.

I am not advocating that fact checkers be outlawed, of course. Nor am I saying that free and open information is bad. The NRA has the right idea, facts do not kill candidates, ideologies kill candidates. An IED in the hands of a radical ideology can do more damage than an aircraft carrier in the hands of a civilized one. Wars and political debates are won not with weapons or facts, but by leaders who know what they are defending, whose loyalties are steadfast, and whose vision extends far beyond the next battlefield.

The Truth and Nothing But...a Good Story

A few months ago, a friend of mine who leans to the right politically shared a post on Facebook that started out like this:

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the last Presidential election:

• Number of States won by: Obama: 19 McCain: 29
• Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 McCain: 2,427,000
• Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 million McCain: 143 million
• Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Obama: 13.2 McCain: 2.1

You may have seen this post, or even shared it yourself. By now, it is well known that it is a hoax, an urban legend, and almost every "fact" in it is false. By false, I mean provably incorrect, wrong, intentionally misleading, the opposite of the truth. A lie of the vicious variety. Thinking that my friend, an intelligent, honorable, well-educated man, must have just posted this Internet hoax without checking it out first, I commented on his post, helpfully (I thought) pointing out his mistake, including several links proving the thing is false.

But my friend simply deleted my comment and left the original post as it was, continuing to garner many "likes" from his like-minded friends. Incredulous, I commented again, this time asking, "Doesn't it bother you just a little that your post is utterly untrue?" His response was devastatingly brief, "Not one bit."

At this point I could have unfriended and written this guy off as just another whacked out Republican. But a few weeks later another friend, this time a left-leaning one, shared a news article in which Ann Romney is quoted as saying, "I mean really, all this wanting to be equal nonsense is going to be detrimental to the future of women everywhere." This time, my friend quickly realized this was a vicious fabrication (humorless satire isn't satire at all, just a lie). He posted a retraction and removed the original link. But instead of just saying, "I screwed up, please ignore," he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, the fact that so many people believed the article is an indication that it might be true, and in any case we should carefully consider the attitudes and positions of a potential First Lady before choosing her husband as president. In other words, if enough people find something to be plausible, it is likely to be at least partly true.

So it seems, on both sides of the political spectrum, we don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. And we never have. If you are a fan of Atlas Shrugged, Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, The Republic, The Holy Bible, or almost any great work of literature, you know that a good story woven around a fictional set of "facts" is just as effective at shaping opinions, if not more so, than any dry set of statements, numbers, and statistics that have only the slightest advantage of being true. People are moved to action by narratives, not facts.

In Conflict, Compromise, and Consensus, I stated, "If one argues for an idea, or fights for it, it should be out of conviction the idea is righteous and true." In response to this, my good friend Dr. Russell Turpin points this out:

Among the most seductive of fallacies are the notions that believing something that is true must be advantageous, and conversely that believing what’s false is detrimental.

Well said. A good story is often more valuable than the truth. And facts are relative to the times and communities in which they are found. Ethics, however, are not -- at least not in my view. It is universally unethical to tell a good story based on facts you know to be false within your community. It is wrong to wield the terrible power of argumentation or war in defense of something you know to be a falsehood, even if it is to your advantage to do so.

Nevertheless, facts are rarely the best way to win an argument or an election. When faced with the necessity to choose between two alternatives in the real world, my favorite modern religious allegory, "The Life of Pi," supplies the answer in its final paragraphs. Which story makes you happiest?

"Jane, you ignorant slut."

"Dan, you pompous ass."

Remember the '70s when phrases like that in an SNL sketch were so outrageous, so over the top, they actually were kinda funny? Today, of course, those old Point / Counter Point sketches seem more prescient than outrageous, as "serious" news commentators routinely say things like this with the same calm, deliberate, faux intellectual deadpan Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin used back then. And it's not just talk radio where this occurs.

Most major online news outlets and blogs now allow readers to comment on op-ed pieces they publish. If you've ever read any of those commentary streams, you know they can quickly degrade into name calling and personal attacks, especially on those sites that allow commentators to post using anonymous pseudonyms. The grandiose idea that thousands of readers could contribute something constructive and positive to a thoughtful online conversation has been, to date, one of the most miserable failures associated with the Internet since its inception.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media and owner of a bunch of popular blogs, makes no bones about it. He says,  "It's a promise that has so not happened that people don't even have that ambition anymore. The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership — that's a joke."

Why has this laudable Internet ambition been such an abject failure, and what, if anything can be done to fix it? I have spent the past few months reading thousands of comments attached to articles on a wide variety of topics.  To be sure, the effect is often depressing and sometimes frightening. But I do not think the reason this hasn't worked is a lack of intelligent people out there. On the contrary, I see many well-reasoned, well-written posts, some making points with which I agree and some with which I disagree. People still remember how to disagree with one another without ripping each other to shreds with ad hominem attacks. The trouble is, the constructive comments are often submerged in a cesspool of vile language, deliberate disinformation, intellectual immaturity, and troll bait.

I have developed a few tricks that help me leaf through the commentary streams quickly, identifying the comments that may have value and skipping the ones that probably should not have been written in the first place. One such trick is based on a quote often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt,

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

I've found you can quickly scan a post to determine whether the author is going to talk about ideas, events, or people. The first category are usually interesting, the second sometimes interesting, and the last almost never. Here are some examples from the commentary stream on the CNN article I linked above.

Ideas

@veggiedude - Siri (and IBM's Watson) has shown how well artificial intelligence can work. The solution is to employ a Siri type moderator to decide whether to post or not post the comments from the users. This way, a machine is in control, and there is no one to get mad at - unless a person 'enjoys' getting mad at a machine.

@maestro406 - Allow a "squelch" option. Everyone has the right to post, but that doesn't mean I have to read every comment from every poster. I should be able to block individual posters on my computer.

Events/Examples

@swohio - And the funny thing is, so many news sites have switched over to making people log in using Facebook in order to leave comments, stating it will help facilitate more mature, reasonable, and engaging discussion/comments. Sad to say, it hasn't at the sites I used to comment on where they've switched over to that system.

@GloriaBTM - The most enjoyable board I've posted on were IMDB around 2005-07, both because of the format, variety of topics, and the way it was moderated. (I'm not sure what it's like now...) We were able to have real conversations about current events, science, religion (and yes, movies), without have to wade through so much muck. Most importantly, posters whose posts were repeatedly deleted for violating T&C had their accounts deleted, fairly quickly. Yes, people could create new accounts, but it did slow the nastiness down.People could also IGNORE certain posters. It was brilliant. You just click ignore and you don't have to see them ever again.I found the format easier to navigate than any other board I've been on. Each thread could collapse (truly collapse, unlike here, where it still takes up space, though the message is blanked). Then you could quickly scroll through and find your conversation and open that thread.

People

@Tzckrl - STOOPID! R u kidding? Palin and Santarum 2012! Anyone who don't think so is a twerp!

@TommiGI - South by Southwest is a joke and Nick Denton is the punchline.

Another, sometimes more reliable, trick is to jot down the aliases of commentators who post useful or interesting comments and then scan for other comments by those same aliases. Of course, this is made more difficult if users are allowed to choose arbitrary, anonymous handles each time they log in. As @swohio indicates above, the recent tendency of other sites to require Facebook logins in order to try to enforce authenticity has had mixed results. While that approach doesn't seem to help moderate the crazies, as you might think it would, it does at least provide a consistent screen name for posters so that you can more easily spot the ones who have had a better track record in the past.

In Trust Me, I'm @HamsterOfDoom I talked about how a framework like the Ethosphere can help develop and maintain trust relationships with pseudonymous identities. By maintaining a numerical ranking, a rep as I call it in the Ethosphere, that reflects the degree to which an alias has contributed constructively to the community in the past, we can more easily filter out the noise while still allowing open participation. The trolls can still troll, but their influence in the group will be limited.

Another possible approach, proposed by Nick Denton in the linked interview, could have a similar impact.

The answer? Denton said his sites are planning to post some stories that allow only a hand-picked, pre-approved group of people to comment on them. That, he said, would make the comment section an extension of the story and allow people [...] to have their say without fear of being piled onto by others.

The fundamental difficulty with this approach is that someone else, the publisher?, anoints an elite few who may participate in the conversation. This is counter to the original goal of open participation and violates an unwritten Internet law just as much as requiring authentic logins would. A better solution is to allow the participants themselves to choose who should have proportionately greater influence, in a dynamic and ongoing fashion. In I'm Not Elitist, Just Better Than You, I discuss how and why this is done within the Ethosphere.

Do you think pseudonyms + reputation could be a possible solution to this problem?  Are there other self-policing, self-organizing ways to do this?

Trust Me, I'm @HamsterOfDoom

When an alias becomes a member of a teamspace, it brings no experience, no track record, no reputation within that context. Instead, a member's rep is accumulated over time as a result of constructive participation in the teamspace. If an alias becomes a member of more than one teamspace, its rep within each is independently earned and maintained. A member's reps in other teamspaces are publically visible to all members, but those other reps do not have influence across teamspace boundaries, except possibly as a consideration during the membership application process.

In a later post, I will begin to define what is meant by "constructive participation in a teamspace" by discussing some of the specific activities that can effect, positively or negatively, a member's rep. But before getting into the detailed mechanics of reputation transactions, let's first discuss the general goals and philosophy of the Ethosphere reputation mechanisms.

Within Ethosphere, and elsewhere on the Internet, anonymity is both a blessing and a curse. The ability to choose a handle like @HamsterOfDoom that does not divulge any private information about you and to choose different handles for different contexts are highly valuable, if not essential, features for navigating through the privacy minefield that is the Internet. On the other hand, if you are posting or commenting at, say, a political site as @HamsterOfDoom, your insights and opinions are valued no more or less than every other poster, whether you happen to be a pundit or a produce manager in real life. It all boils down to trust, or lack thereof. The basic goal of the rep mechanism in Ethosphere is to enable such trust relationships between pseudonymous members of a teamspace.

Obviously, you would tend to have more trust in another team member with whom you have personally had a history of constructive and beneficial (if not always agreeable) interaction. This is how you might come to trust, or at least identify another commenter on, say, the NY Times or Fox News web sites. Similarly, if you are following a Twitter user called @TomHanks, the only real way to be sure this is the real Hollywood actor/producer instead of a teenager from Cleveland or something, is to watch its tweets and build, over time, a trust relationship with that anonymous handle based solely on what it says online.

The rep mechanism provides a simple way to quantify this type of contextual trust and share it with others. In the Ethosphere, the question, "Who is this really?" will rarely come up. A member with a high rep is likely to be trusted, at least within the context of that teamspace, based on its cumulative interactions with many different members of the team. The member's identity in real life, whether she has a degree or a famous father or a big bank account, is irrelevant in Ethosphere. This may sound strange at first, because we have come to equate integrity with personal identity. But does it really matter so much if the tweets posted by some user named @BarackObama were physically typed by the President of the United States, instead of someone close enough to him to know his thoughts and activities? Moreover, if you are within a teamspace whose charter is to solve American national political problems, what really matters is how successful @BarackObama is proposing good solutions and driving consensus for those proposals. Whether that member is a political science professor, a meat market manager, or POTUS is completely irrelevant.

The Ethosphere is not only a meritocracy, it is also a simple economy and rep is its fundamental currency.