Welcome! Your situation sucks, there doesn’t seem to be a good solution. Most people don’t care about technical truth; they are interested about being in harmony with their friends. In addition to these usual problems, saying certain things in Russia (from my perspective: true things) carries a prison penalty. Be careful lest you explicitly say something illegal (such as “there is a war”).
I live in Slovakia, which is a country in EU most susceptible to Russian propaganda. I know this type of people. Every source that disagrees with them is automatically American propaganda; their leader and their fellow followers are apparently the only independently thinking people in the entire universe. (No, it is not suspicious at all.) If you try to argue against that openly, the only thing you can achieve is being called an American propagandist yourself.
What you can do, is nitpick. Like, pretend that you agree with 95% of what they say (so they see you as someone on their side, definitely not an American propagandist) and gently point out that some 5% is factually wrong… not that it changes the big picture at all! just saying. I don’t know if this, iterated 1000 times, improves things, but I kinda hope so. I mean, it might get some of them used to the novel idea of “being wrong”, and maybe at some moment in future they will apply this new skill to a larger part of their worldview. (It would be too late for the 2022 Ukraine war, but there certainly will be other conflicts in the future.)
I’m interested if there were any attempts at formal rules of transforming media feed into world model. Preferably with Bayesian interference and cool math.
I think this wouldn’t work at all. If you start from the position “everyone is lying”, then no matter how much you read, it all fits into the “they are lying” hypothesis. Also, it’s not like humans can do Bayesian calculations dispassionately when discussing politics.
If you assume that all news sources are directed by the same group of people, then the fact that all of them happen to agree on X doesn’t mean that you should multiply the probabilities—it is actually what you would expect in the world where all news sources are actually directed by the same group of people. (But if they disagree, well, maybe they are just trying to confuse you!)
What I am trying to do, is to read many sources, including the ones I disagree with. And I assume that after reading enough, it will somehow “click” and I will see that some things make sense and some don’t. But I wouldn’t try to put numbers on that. It is difficult, and it would invite clever people to game the system. At the end, the only person you can educate semi-reliably is yourself. Because it requires honest cooperation, and most people are not going to cooperate at being proven wrong.
they are mostly smart people (knowledge jobs, high IQ).
Sometimes, intelligent people are just better at inventing clever arguments in favor of stupid conclusions. But of course, they would reply that this actually applies to you, so no point telling them.
Welcome! Your situation sucks, there doesn’t seem to be a good solution. Most people don’t care about technical truth; they are interested about being in harmony with their friends. In addition to these usual problems, saying certain things in Russia (from my perspective: true things) carries a prison penalty. Be careful lest you explicitly say something illegal (such as “there is a war”).
I live in Slovakia, which is a country in EU most susceptible to Russian propaganda. I know this type of people. Every source that disagrees with them is automatically American propaganda; their leader and their fellow followers are apparently the only independently thinking people in the entire universe. (No, it is not suspicious at all.) If you try to argue against that openly, the only thing you can achieve is being called an American propagandist yourself.
What you can do, is nitpick. Like, pretend that you agree with 95% of what they say (so they see you as someone on their side, definitely not an American propagandist) and gently point out that some 5% is factually wrong… not that it changes the big picture at all! just saying. I don’t know if this, iterated 1000 times, improves things, but I kinda hope so. I mean, it might get some of them used to the novel idea of “being wrong”, and maybe at some moment in future they will apply this new skill to a larger part of their worldview. (It would be too late for the 2022 Ukraine war, but there certainly will be other conflicts in the future.)
I think this wouldn’t work at all. If you start from the position “everyone is lying”, then no matter how much you read, it all fits into the “they are lying” hypothesis. Also, it’s not like humans can do Bayesian calculations dispassionately when discussing politics.
If you assume that all news sources are directed by the same group of people, then the fact that all of them happen to agree on X doesn’t mean that you should multiply the probabilities—it is actually what you would expect in the world where all news sources are actually directed by the same group of people. (But if they disagree, well, maybe they are just trying to confuse you!)
What I am trying to do, is to read many sources, including the ones I disagree with. And I assume that after reading enough, it will somehow “click” and I will see that some things make sense and some don’t. But I wouldn’t try to put numbers on that. It is difficult, and it would invite clever people to game the system. At the end, the only person you can educate semi-reliably is yourself. Because it requires honest cooperation, and most people are not going to cooperate at being proven wrong.
Sometimes, intelligent people are just better at inventing clever arguments in favor of stupid conclusions. But of course, they would reply that this actually applies to you, so no point telling them.