If anyone is interested in hearing the Russian point of view of the war “special operation”, you can do it here: https://www.gazeta.ru/. Google translator works amazingly well.
The live news are especially interesting, but the auto-refresh is activated by default, which means that the site takes a while to be translated into English and it is annoying. You can turn it off by clicking here:
In the Russian news the Ruble does not lose value, but the USD and the EUR are just soaring
To clarify: this site contains very effective propaganda that makes it a cognitohazard. You are likely underestimating its danger. It is not “just a bunch of fake statements”. It is “a bunch of statements optimized for inflicting particular effects on its readers”. Such “particular effects” are not limited to believing in what news says. In fact, news regularly contradict what they said a few months ago even in peace time, so believing what they are literally saying is probably not the point.
Before reading propaganda consider that such materials:
1) Convinced a lot (a majority?) of Russians that Russian army is heroically fighting western nazis.
1.1) Not all such Russians are dumb—some of them are rather smart, there are some scientists, etc.
2) Convinced some (a sizable minority?) of Ukrainians that they are living under nazi rule.
3) It is possible that you are at a disadvantage compared to all those people since you likely haven’t encountered such propaganda before. For example, there are a lot of contrmemes to government propaganda in Russian culture. Some of them are exploited by modern propaganda (All other media are also lying!), but I suspect that their effect is net positive, especially in more educated people.
Any old nonsense will convince a non-zero number of people, but I don’t see any evidence for #2 for people living in areas Russia doesn’t physically control in numbers that should worry us? The UA rate of thinking Nazi rule seems much lower than e.g. the USA rate of thinking home Nazi rule here, which seems importantly non-zero. (Also worth noting the word Nazi in this context means something importantly distinct, although still quite terrible).
On #3 I would very much expect the opposite. People at LW are very good vs. such tactics in general, and are high-information, and have access to Western sources, and this stuff is optimized to appeal to people in the former USSR. Consider how effective Russian efforts have been in the West in general. And we’re going in knowing it is what it is, which is highly protective.
Strangely, this site seems like it’s an attempt to be a sane Russian-slanted source, that is being careful not to say obviously false things, as opposed to most Russian sources that are not doing that—and I expect that most people who believe the RU line are coming from the other kind of news source. Many of the front page news sources match exactly my western sources, without even an attempt to spin the information, and are indeed newsworthy developments.
#2: My impression is that something like 2%-10% of Ukrainian population believed that a month ago (would you consider that worrying enough?). My evidence for that is very shacky and it is indeed quite possible that I am overestimating it by an order of magnitude (still kind of worrying, though I might be overestimating even more).
First, my aunt is among them. Second, over last few years I’ve seen multiple (something like 5-10, concentrated around present date?) discussions on social media where friends of friends (all Russians) said that they believe in nazi-controlled Ukraine since their relatives in Ukraine in some or another way confirmed it (perhaps such relatives are predominantly from occupied territories?).
Third, a lot of Russian families have close relatives in Ukraine (I can’t find any statistics, but by eyeballing families of my friends, I’d say something like 1⁄3 in Moscow). If a lot of such relatives believed in Russian propaganda, that would explain so many Russians believe it as well (there are rumors that some are choosing to believe tv over their relatives, but I haven’t personally witnessed any of that). And this “a lot of such relatives” don’t need to be implausibly big, since “Ukrainians believing in Russian propaganda” are likely overrepresented among close relatives of Russians.
On #3 I would very much expect the opposite. People at LW are very good vs. such tactics in general, and are high-information, and have access to Western sources, and this stuff is optimized to appeal to people in the former USSR.
I agree with all your points, but I don’t think that it is opposite of what I meant to say. When I was talking about being at disadvantage, I didn’t mean that western lesswrongers that will visit this site will be more affected by it then average Russians. I meant that western lesswronger will have not only obvious advantages (that you listed), but also some disadvantages, perhaps less obvious to westerners (is “disadvantage” a wrong word to use here?). That’s why I was talking about “underestimating danger” (another part of that was an attempt to make people even more cautious).
Yes, sure, the danger is not that big, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll noticeably negatively affect at least 0.1% of lesswrongers who visit such site (obviously conditioned on a lot of them visiting such site), and I absolutely won’t risk something like that just for curiosity.
Strangely, this site seems like it’s an attempt to be a sane Russian-slanted source
I am following my own advice and haven’t read their articles since like 2013 when they lost their independence (and haven’t been a regular reader before that). But my not very educated guess would be that if your observation is correct, then it is one of news sources that initially were independent, then became government-controlled, and are still posing as mostly-inependent, e.g. lie only when it is important. Kind of optimized for highly educated opposition-leaning people in the former USSR.
Yes. I am repeatedly surprised how some people, even those otherwise quite intelligent, just don’t seem to realize (or perhaps they just don’t mind) that they keep believing sources that contradict what they said yesterday. I guess some people just don’t bother building a consistent model of reality, and they live fully at Simulacrum level 3.
I recently listened to some Putin’s speech which other pro-Putin people have praised. And on one hand, I was like: “Yeah, what he says is internally consistent, and I feel like I can empathise with what he is trying to convey.” But on the other hand, I also noticed that there were just too many things that contradict what I currently believe about the world, so either pretty much everything I believe is wrong, or he is simply lying. And, well, the probability is never 0 or 1, but the priors on “a politician is lying” are not that low.
That is, definitely a cognitohazard. An average person would probably accept 50% of it. A person who tries to be consistent will either resist it… or with a tiny probability switch to a new gestalt.
I mean… of course, if anyone desires to spend their time reading that shit, I can’t stop them anyway. I just wish in general that there would be less sharing of such links.
There is this theory that freedom of speech is always good, because exposure to evil memes builds your immune system. But, analogically to the actual immune system, sometimes it makes you stronger, and sometimes it (mind-)kills you. In real life, we do not actually keep ourselves healthy by exposing ourselves to every possible toxin. Hygiene actually increases our lifespan. Also, the theory assumes that there is a marketplace of ideas, where people meet both good and bad ideas, and they compete. But currently we have clickbait-powered online bubbles, where people exposed to some memes just isolate themselves from information that opposes those memes. (Which, I am quite aware of the irony, is how they would describe me. Because, you can always flip your map, and its symmetric version will be just as self-consistent as the original one. In addition, you need to explore the territory, and compare your map to it.)
First, avoiding arguments from the “other side” on the basis that they might convince you of false things assumes that the other side’s belief are in fact false. Maybe instead your side’s beliefs are false? How are you going to know if you don’t hear what the other side is saying? Are you just going on the theory that this time it’s so clear that one doesn’t need to look?
I would actually take the admonition “don’t read those arguments, they’re just mind-killing propaganda!” as a good sign that someone is themselves dispensing (or repeating) propaganda.
Second, even assuming the “other side” has nothing true to convey, to build a model of how the world works, you have to know how the people on the “other side” are thinking. If Russian propaganda is diabolically effective, don’t we need to know what it is, in order to predict how millions of Russians are going to behave?
There is some amount of evidence that should convince you that the other side is wrong. How much time would you spend reading articles saying that horoscopes are real? People are allowed to move their beliefs away from the 50:50 prior, otherwise what would be the point of collecting evidence.
Second, even assuming the “other side” has nothing true to convey, to build a model of how the world works, you have to know how the people on the “other side” are thinking.
First I would recommend observing their actions. Only after you noticed some patterns, you should start listening to what they say. Otherwise their words may distract you from their actions. -- That shouldn’t happen to a hypothetical perfect rationalist, but it sometimes happens to humans.
First, avoiding arguments from the “other side” on the basis that they might convince you of false things assumes that the other side’s belief are in fact false.
I believe it is less about true/false, but whether you believe the “other side” is making a well-intentioned effort at obtaining and sharing accurate maps of reality. On practical level, I think it is unlikely studying Russian media in detail is useful and cost-effective for a modal LWer.
Propaganda during wartime, especially during total war, is a prima facia example of situation where every player of note is doing their best to convince you of something in order to produce certain effects. [2] To continue with the map metaphor, they want to you to have a certain kind of map that will guide you to certain location. All parties wish to do this to some extent, and because it is a situation with the highest stakes of all, they are putting in their best effort.
Suppose you read lots of Western media sources and then a lot of Russian media sources. All sides in the conflict do their best to fill the air with favorable propaganda. You will find yourself doing a lot of reading, and I don’t know if there is any guarantee you can achieve any good results by interpolating between two propaganda-infused maps [1], instead of say, reading much less of both Western media and Russian media and trying to find good close-to-ground signals, or outsourcing the time-consuming analysis part to people / sources who you have a good reason to trust to do a good analysis (preferably you have vetted them before the conflict, and you can trust the reason still applies).
So the good reason to read Russian media to analyze it, is if you have a good reason to believe you would be good analyst of Russian media sphere. But if you were, would you find yourself reading a Russian newspaper you had not heard about two weeks ago with Google translate?
[1] I don’t have references at hand to give a good summary, but imagine you are your great*-grandparent and reading newspapers during WW2. At great expense you manage to get newspapers from London, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow. Are you going to get good picture of “what happens” by reading them all? I think you would get some idea of how situation develops by reading accounts of battles and cross-referencing a map, but I don’t know it would be worth the expense. One thing I know, none of them is reporting much at all about the thing you most likely consider most salient about WW2, namely, the holocaust and the atomic bomb until after the fact.
[2] edit. addendum. Zvi used the word “hostile” and I want to stress its importance. During peacetime and in internal politics it is often a mistake to assume hostile influences (ie. conflict on conflict/mistake theory spectrum), because then you are engaging in a conflict all the time and likely to escalate it more and more. But now that we have a major European war, I think that is a good situation to assume that the players in the field are actually “hostile” because there is a shooting war conflict to begin with.
If you live in one of the countries at war, you will inevitably be exposed to “your” side’s propaganda. If you also look at the propaganda produced by the other side, you may well gain valuable information. For instance, if both sides acknowledge the truth of some fact, you can be reasonably sure that that it is the truth (whereas otherwise you might doubt whether your side is telling the truth about that). And if the other side’s propaganda talks about some issue that you’ve never even heard about, it may be useful to research whether something is being concealed by your side.
Even when those writing the propaganda have zero concern with telling the truth, they often will tell the truth, simply because it tends to be more believable. So looking at propaganda may expose you to true statements (which you hadn’t previously considered), which you may be able to confirm are true by independent means.
Yes. I am repeatedly surprised how some people, even those otherwise quite intelligent, just don’t seem to realize (or perhaps they just don’t mind) that they keep believing sources that contradict what they said yesterday. I guess some people just don’t bother building a consistent model of reality, and they live fully at Simulacrum level 3.
If I look at COVID reporting, then it seems like most news sources whether mainstream or alternative had those problems.
If the last two years have taught me anything is that it’s far for people to attempt to build a consistent model of reality when dealing with politically charged topics.
If anyone is interested in hearing the Russian point of view of the
war“special operation”, you can do it here: https://www.gazeta.ru/. Google translator works amazingly well.The live news are especially interesting, but the auto-refresh is activated by default, which means that the site takes a while to be translated into English and it is annoying. You can turn it off by clicking here:
In the Russian news the Ruble does not lose value, but the USD and the EUR are just soaring
To clarify: this site contains very effective propaganda that makes it a cognitohazard. You are likely underestimating its danger. It is not “just a bunch of fake statements”. It is “a bunch of statements optimized for inflicting particular effects on its readers”. Such “particular effects” are not limited to believing in what news says. In fact, news regularly contradict what they said a few months ago even in peace time, so believing what they are literally saying is probably not the point.
Before reading propaganda consider that such materials:
1) Convinced a lot (a majority?) of Russians that Russian army is heroically fighting western nazis.
1.1) Not all such Russians are dumb—some of them are rather smart, there are some scientists, etc.
2) Convinced some (a sizable minority?) of Ukrainians that they are living under nazi rule.
3) It is possible that you are at a disadvantage compared to all those people since you likely haven’t encountered such propaganda before.
For example, there are a lot of contrmemes to government propaganda in Russian culture. Some of them are exploited by modern propaganda (All other media are also lying!), but I suspect that their effect is net positive, especially in more educated people.
Any old nonsense will convince a non-zero number of people, but I don’t see any evidence for #2 for people living in areas Russia doesn’t physically control in numbers that should worry us? The UA rate of thinking Nazi rule seems much lower than e.g. the USA rate of thinking home Nazi rule here, which seems importantly non-zero. (Also worth noting the word Nazi in this context means something importantly distinct, although still quite terrible).
On #3 I would very much expect the opposite. People at LW are very good vs. such tactics in general, and are high-information, and have access to Western sources, and this stuff is optimized to appeal to people in the former USSR. Consider how effective Russian efforts have been in the West in general. And we’re going in knowing it is what it is, which is highly protective.
Strangely, this site seems like it’s an attempt to be a sane Russian-slanted source, that is being careful not to say obviously false things, as opposed to most Russian sources that are not doing that—and I expect that most people who believe the RU line are coming from the other kind of news source. Many of the front page news sources match exactly my western sources, without even an attempt to spin the information, and are indeed newsworthy developments.
#2: My impression is that something like 2%-10% of Ukrainian population believed that a month ago (would you consider that worrying enough?). My evidence for that is very shacky and it is indeed quite possible that I am overestimating it by an order of magnitude (still kind of worrying, though I might be overestimating even more).
First, my aunt is among them. Second, over last few years I’ve seen multiple (something like 5-10, concentrated around present date?) discussions on social media where friends of friends (all Russians) said that they believe in nazi-controlled Ukraine since their relatives in Ukraine in some or another way confirmed it (perhaps such relatives are predominantly from occupied territories?).
Third, a lot of Russian families have close relatives in Ukraine (I can’t find any statistics, but by eyeballing families of my friends, I’d say something like 1⁄3 in Moscow). If a lot of such relatives believed in Russian propaganda, that would explain so many Russians believe it as well (there are rumors that some are choosing to believe tv over their relatives, but I haven’t personally witnessed any of that). And this “a lot of such relatives” don’t need to be implausibly big, since “Ukrainians believing in Russian propaganda” are likely overrepresented among close relatives of Russians.
I agree with all your points, but I don’t think that it is opposite of what I meant to say. When I was talking about being at disadvantage, I didn’t mean that western lesswrongers that will visit this site will be more affected by it then average Russians. I meant that western lesswronger will have not only obvious advantages (that you listed), but also some disadvantages, perhaps less obvious to westerners (is “disadvantage” a wrong word to use here?). That’s why I was talking about “underestimating danger” (another part of that was an attempt to make people even more cautious).
Yes, sure, the danger is not that big, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll noticeably negatively affect at least 0.1% of lesswrongers who visit such site (obviously conditioned on a lot of them visiting such site), and I absolutely won’t risk something like that just for curiosity.
I am following my own advice and haven’t read their articles since like 2013 when they lost their independence (and haven’t been a regular reader before that). But my not very educated guess would be that if your observation is correct, then it is one of news sources that initially were independent, then became government-controlled, and are still posing as mostly-inependent, e.g. lie only when it is important. Kind of optimized for highly educated opposition-leaning people in the former USSR.
Yes. I am repeatedly surprised how some people, even those otherwise quite intelligent, just don’t seem to realize (or perhaps they just don’t mind) that they keep believing sources that contradict what they said yesterday. I guess some people just don’t bother building a consistent model of reality, and they live fully at Simulacrum level 3.
I recently listened to some Putin’s speech which other pro-Putin people have praised. And on one hand, I was like: “Yeah, what he says is internally consistent, and I feel like I can empathise with what he is trying to convey.” But on the other hand, I also noticed that there were just too many things that contradict what I currently believe about the world, so either pretty much everything I believe is wrong, or he is simply lying. And, well, the probability is never 0 or 1, but the priors on “a politician is lying” are not that low.
That is, definitely a cognitohazard. An average person would probably accept 50% of it. A person who tries to be consistent will either resist it… or with a tiny probability switch to a new gestalt.
I mean… of course, if anyone desires to spend their time reading that shit, I can’t stop them anyway. I just wish in general that there would be less sharing of such links.
There is this theory that freedom of speech is always good, because exposure to evil memes builds your immune system. But, analogically to the actual immune system, sometimes it makes you stronger, and sometimes it (mind-)kills you. In real life, we do not actually keep ourselves healthy by exposing ourselves to every possible toxin. Hygiene actually increases our lifespan. Also, the theory assumes that there is a marketplace of ideas, where people meet both good and bad ideas, and they compete. But currently we have clickbait-powered online bubbles, where people exposed to some memes just isolate themselves from information that opposes those memes. (Which, I am quite aware of the irony, is how they would describe me. Because, you can always flip your map, and its symmetric version will be just as self-consistent as the original one. In addition, you need to explore the territory, and compare your map to it.)
I see two problems with this view.
First, avoiding arguments from the “other side” on the basis that they might convince you of false things assumes that the other side’s belief are in fact false. Maybe instead your side’s beliefs are false? How are you going to know if you don’t hear what the other side is saying? Are you just going on the theory that this time it’s so clear that one doesn’t need to look?
I would actually take the admonition “don’t read those arguments, they’re just mind-killing propaganda!” as a good sign that someone is themselves dispensing (or repeating) propaganda.
Second, even assuming the “other side” has nothing true to convey, to build a model of how the world works, you have to know how the people on the “other side” are thinking. If Russian propaganda is diabolically effective, don’t we need to know what it is, in order to predict how millions of Russians are going to behave?
There is some amount of evidence that should convince you that the other side is wrong. How much time would you spend reading articles saying that horoscopes are real? People are allowed to move their beliefs away from the 50:50 prior, otherwise what would be the point of collecting evidence.
First I would recommend observing their actions. Only after you noticed some patterns, you should start listening to what they say. Otherwise their words may distract you from their actions. -- That shouldn’t happen to a hypothetical perfect rationalist, but it sometimes happens to humans.
I believe it is less about true/false, but whether you believe the “other side” is making a well-intentioned effort at obtaining and sharing accurate maps of reality. On practical level, I think it is unlikely studying Russian media in detail is useful and cost-effective for a modal LWer.
Propaganda during wartime, especially during total war, is a prima facia example of situation where every player of note is doing their best to convince you of something in order to produce certain effects. [2] To continue with the map metaphor, they want to you to have a certain kind of map that will guide you to certain location. All parties wish to do this to some extent, and because it is a situation with the highest stakes of all, they are putting in their best effort.
Suppose you read lots of Western media sources and then a lot of Russian media sources. All sides in the conflict do their best to fill the air with favorable propaganda. You will find yourself doing a lot of reading, and I don’t know if there is any guarantee you can achieve any good results by interpolating between two propaganda-infused maps [1], instead of say, reading much less of both Western media and Russian media and trying to find good close-to-ground signals, or outsourcing the time-consuming analysis part to people / sources who you have a good reason to trust to do a good analysis (preferably you have vetted them before the conflict, and you can trust the reason still applies).
So the good reason to read Russian media to analyze it, is if you have a good reason to believe you would be good analyst of Russian media sphere. But if you were, would you find yourself reading a Russian newspaper you had not heard about two weeks ago with Google translate?
[1] I don’t have references at hand to give a good summary, but imagine you are your great*-grandparent and reading newspapers during WW2. At great expense you manage to get newspapers from London, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow. Are you going to get good picture of “what happens” by reading them all? I think you would get some idea of how situation develops by reading accounts of battles and cross-referencing a map, but I don’t know it would be worth the expense. One thing I know, none of them is reporting much at all about the thing you most likely consider most salient about WW2, namely, the holocaust and the atomic bomb until after the fact.
[2] edit. addendum. Zvi used the word “hostile” and I want to stress its importance. During peacetime and in internal politics it is often a mistake to assume hostile influences (ie. conflict on conflict/mistake theory spectrum), because then you are engaging in a conflict all the time and likely to escalate it more and more. But now that we have a major European war, I think that is a good situation to assume that the players in the field are actually “hostile” because there is a shooting war conflict to begin with.
If you live in one of the countries at war, you will inevitably be exposed to “your” side’s propaganda. If you also look at the propaganda produced by the other side, you may well gain valuable information. For instance, if both sides acknowledge the truth of some fact, you can be reasonably sure that that it is the truth (whereas otherwise you might doubt whether your side is telling the truth about that). And if the other side’s propaganda talks about some issue that you’ve never even heard about, it may be useful to research whether something is being concealed by your side.
Even when those writing the propaganda have zero concern with telling the truth, they often will tell the truth, simply because it tends to be more believable. So looking at propaganda may expose you to true statements (which you hadn’t previously considered), which you may be able to confirm are true by independent means.
If I look at COVID reporting, then it seems like most news sources whether mainstream or alternative had those problems.
If the last two years have taught me anything is that it’s far for people to attempt to build a consistent model of reality when dealing with politically charged topics.