I think Zvi calls this a hostile epistemic environment since there are actors that try really hard to produce convincing propaganda. Maybe a helpful heuristic is this: Are there checks and balanches for the media? As far as I know, this is hardly the case in Russia right now since independent media outlets have been shut down and you can be jailed for expressing your sincere opinion. This is a very bad sign. (If there were some kind of freedom of speech, more people would be scrutinizing important claims, so that not hearing these critics would be evidence for the truthfulness of these claims, I guess.) Unfortunately, the EU also started blocking Russion state media outlets and thereby complicating the situation, but still, you don’t have to worry being jailed for expressing a contrarian opinion.
Besides these quick thoughts, I want to propose a framing of the problem. Assume there’s a coin in the world and everybody has high stakes in whether it is fair or biased. Now, different news outlets report what they found out when they flipped the coin themselves. So some report that they got “1000x tails” and others state that their experiments suggest the coin is fair. Maybe they are, technically, both correct in their statements but ignored some coin flips that did not fit into their narrative. [Disclaimer: This doesn’t capture everything of real-world news but gives a feeling for the more complex topics where you build your opinion from lots of tiny pieces of evidence.]
The bottom line is that in a no-trust environment (which exists when people with disjoint trusted sources try to communicate), it’s not possible to settle whether the coin is fair.
A solution that I find, theoretically, especially exciting is adversarial collaboration. You team up with a person of opposite opinion and devise some kind of experiment (or active observation) that helps settle the diagreement. In the above framing, flip the coin several times in the presence of the other person and follow a previously agreed protocol of determining which side is supported by the evidence.
In practice, this is hard. We (most of us) cannot just go to Ukraine (if we’re not already there) to observe what really happens. But what if we think bigger? Imagine thousands of people with diverse opinions of the topic to join forces. They would have a lot more resources to do active observations to reconciliate their differing opinions. For example, as a large group they have better chances to interview important people. If they are honest players, they might agree on a small group of people to travel and actively make observations together. It is also easier for a large group to gather and prominent answers to unsettled questions. The precondition is the honest will to engage with the other side and truthfully settle the disputes.
Unfortunately, this is just a theoretical idea I wasn’t able to test in practice, yet—and it seems hard to imagine to found such an organization in a state where one can be punished for critical inquiry.
I think Zvi calls this a hostile epistemic environment since there are actors that try really hard to produce convincing propaganda. Maybe a helpful heuristic is this: Are there checks and balanches for the media? As far as I know, this is hardly the case in Russia right now since independent media outlets have been shut down and you can be jailed for expressing your sincere opinion. This is a very bad sign. (If there were some kind of freedom of speech, more people would be scrutinizing important claims, so that not hearing these critics would be evidence for the truthfulness of these claims, I guess.) Unfortunately, the EU also started blocking Russion state media outlets and thereby complicating the situation, but still, you don’t have to worry being jailed for expressing a contrarian opinion.
Besides these quick thoughts, I want to propose a framing of the problem. Assume there’s a coin in the world and everybody has high stakes in whether it is fair or biased. Now, different news outlets report what they found out when they flipped the coin themselves. So some report that they got “1000x tails” and others state that their experiments suggest the coin is fair. Maybe they are, technically, both correct in their statements but ignored some coin flips that did not fit into their narrative. [Disclaimer: This doesn’t capture everything of real-world news but gives a feeling for the more complex topics where you build your opinion from lots of tiny pieces of evidence.]
The bottom line is that in a no-trust environment (which exists when people with disjoint trusted sources try to communicate), it’s not possible to settle whether the coin is fair.
A solution that I find, theoretically, especially exciting is adversarial collaboration. You team up with a person of opposite opinion and devise some kind of experiment (or active observation) that helps settle the diagreement. In the above framing, flip the coin several times in the presence of the other person and follow a previously agreed protocol of determining which side is supported by the evidence.
In practice, this is hard. We (most of us) cannot just go to Ukraine (if we’re not already there) to observe what really happens. But what if we think bigger? Imagine thousands of people with diverse opinions of the topic to join forces. They would have a lot more resources to do active observations to reconciliate their differing opinions. For example, as a large group they have better chances to interview important people. If they are honest players, they might agree on a small group of people to travel and actively make observations together. It is also easier for a large group to gather and prominent answers to unsettled questions. The precondition is the honest will to engage with the other side and truthfully settle the disputes.
Unfortunately, this is just a theoretical idea I wasn’t able to test in practice, yet—and it seems hard to imagine to found such an organization in a state where one can be punished for critical inquiry.