Misinformation & Disinformation Part 1

Big Trouble in Big China

One of the disorienting things of this current moment that you really can't explain to younger people is how much harder it is to find solid informational ground.

One reason it's hard to explain is that there isn't a clear term or description of what you need to solidify. 

Young people will rightly point out that there was never a time when there was no misnformation. We had yellow journalism, “Remember the Maine!” The War with Mexico was also started on the basis of a lie that Santa Ana had crossed the Rio Grande…all the way up to Vietnam. 

So how is the current moment any different? I could be wrong but I think it is, simply  because a) people of influence, people of power, the president himself, will double down on outlandishly false claims and the strategy of refusal to admit the truth has worked for them. 

This is quite disastrous. 

b) There is much, much less consensus about truth—both about what is true and about the value of truth—than there was in the past. 

However, there have always been ‘misinformation moments’ and we are perhaps always IN a misinformation moment of one kind or another.  Our misinformation moments have multiplied prodigiously since 2015 or so, and there is also a tremendous acceleration of misinformation —so much so that the concept of truth has become much more tenuous. The value for truth has become much weaker. The temptation to think you can make shit up and shape reality by the shit you make up seems to have gripped a lot more people. 

However, I cannot prove it. And this is the problem for everything. The inability to prove it. 

There are certain ideas for which one can entertain the possibility that are bad for people’s ability to grasp truth later, and there are other ones that are good for people’s ability to grasp truth later. 

Personally, I think entertaining the possibility of a more truth-securing information environment than we have now (even if we don’t know what that would look like) would be good for ability to grasp truth. At the very least knowing what is deficiant in our information environment can help reveal some things about how one should gather and receive information. 

But your gut tells you otherwise, if your gut tells you I’m one of ‘those people’ the ones you cannot trust, what do we do? This is the whole problem we have as a society.  We have to trust one another sometimes. We have to trust people’s testimony.  And trust was the first victim of the flood of bullshit under which our culture is subsumed. 

So to come back to misinformation moments—not conspiracy theories but simply moments where some BS comes up…what do we do? How do we avoid falling for the yellow journalism telling us to Remember the Maine, the Domino Theory, the weapons of mass destruction bullshit? 

As much as one hopes there are simple rules for misinformation moments, there really aren’t. A lot is going to depend on your priors. Getting through it is a skill, some kind of tightrope walk between openness to new information and skepticism about new information. Especially important will be an unwillingness to assume everything is very simple or you have the situation perfectly nailed down. Thus, humility is essential. And it’s hard to teach people this skill, since they are both cognitive and reach into people’s character.  Rather than try, I’m going to give an example of my reasoning in such a moment—when it comes to the question of the US and China. 

This is not to say I have the skill. This is actually to show that, in general, we are probably at a loss more often than not and this very experience of being at a loss is how we become so prone to believing misinformation. 

I take China as an example since it is extremely difficult, in fact practically impossible to know which information sources to trust about China or where to get the real skinny on China. 

I tend to think is you can’t fully trust what you read about China as currently a threat to the US. You can either avoid forming beliefs or you can try to screen what you read and apply certain sorting principles to it. 

Epistemic priors, background beliefs or what-have-you may be bulwarks against additional beliefs, which could in some way deflect further information. This prevents you from being informed but might also prevent you from being misinformed.

Let’s call this the situation where you UNTRUSTWORTHY INFORMATIONAL GROUND

I am not sure the China situation is the greatest example but it’s a handy example given the current flood of stuff about China. 

Here are some rubrics/priors whatever you want to call them that I apply to the flood of information on China.

It’s 

1. China is not a military threat to the USA in the standard sense. China is not going to declare war on the USA.

The conflict between the US and China is primarily an economic rather than a military conflict. 

There’s not much that can be done militarily about China. The USA cannot declare war on China. 

 Also, there is little besides Taiwan that is directly of military interest to China. 

So what does this mean when we are told ‘China is a security threat?’ We know that Taiwan is essential to the manufacture of semiconductors. We of course don’t want Taiwan to be invaded. I have friends who live in Taiwan! It would be terrible if China did to Taiwan what it did to Hong Kong. 

Still, it’s not a direct threat to the US. And it’s not clear if the point of US sabre rattling to China is to get it to back off from Taiwan, for domestic political reasons (as the GOP loves to make hay about China partly for racist reasons, partly for reasons of xenophobic economic paraonia) or to justify our grotesque and insane military budget. 

Or a combination of all of these. 

 In stories about China, industrial espionage is almost always the threat. Very rarely is military espionage a threat. 

Are American citizens supposed to see industrial espionage (stealing proprietary information)  as a threat to national security? 

I simply cannot see this as a justification for military belligerence. It’s a justification for better security in the industries that matter. It could never be justifiable to have people dead and maimed for industry control even if this is a reason for war in the past. 

China is a threat to security mainly because it’s a cause of conflict. But this is not the traditional threat to security that armed aggression is. Rather, it’s possible that our own government will respond to conflict with arms. The dynamic between the US and China is the bigger threat rather than the the intention of China to threaten the US militarily. 

Will Americans see it this way? No, they will not. We have always been at war with Eurasia according to CNN or any cable news program. 

We are being prepped for something. It won’t be good. 

Ideologically, I fear Ameiricans have been prepped over time to somehow see the econoimic strength of countries that directly compete with the US whose governments are not extremely friendly to the US as a causus belli. 

We went from US companies investing like wild in China, and a very robust cultural and economic exchange where the assumption was we could be economic and cultural partners with China to what is either a cold war or pre-cold war situation. 

And WHY? Nobody has fully accounted for this dramatic shift except to say that the companies found that China was not amenable (after so many years?), and China had a change of leadership. 

It would be nice to know why. It’s not clear that we can fully trust any of the explanations though. 

2. China is an authoritarian country. Is this relevant to how Americans who are capable of being sensible about China should view China? I don’t know but I don’t think see that it outweighs the harm a new cold war with China could bring, let alone a new hot war. 

While it is authoritarian, news stories describing China’s response to the pandemic have been close to absurd. The criticism of China’s choices —which were a struggle for its population but nevertheless coherent and understandable—bordered on the hysterical. If there is a bad thing to say about China, US newspapers will say it. This makes their coverage seem sketchy. [This is not to say they lied, merely that it undermines the credibility we need to accept much more plausible stories about the Uyghurs, a story which has bizarrely dropped from the news entirely.]

3. China appears to have some bots and trolls on social media. They aren’t very good. Americans panic a lot about ‘foreign bots and trolls.’ My priors are—I don’t know of any evidence where they have had substantial impact on Americans except to make them more paranoid (I assume not their intent. I assume their intent is to shape public opinion. But anything causing problems in the US might be helpful to a foreign government.)

There is also a giant phlanx of even weirder trolls that are continually critical of the Chinese government. If you don’t believe this, read the Epoch Times. 

Someone is also funding truly bizarre anti-China narratives in the USA. 

Again, the problem will be US paranoia rather than an actual miltariy threat China poses to the US. 

4. Internationally, Chinese dipllomacy is a threat because it involves capture of markets. This is possibly of much greater concern to the US than the stealing of proprietary techology. 

5. You just gotta ask yourself—why is there ALWAYS an existenial threat looming somewhere to the United States? How does this ALWAYS happen? As soon as one fades, another takes its place.

As soon as the cold war is over you get ‘the war on terror. As soon as the ‘war on terror’ fizzles you get Russia.  As soon as the Russian military is revealed to be a paper tiger, you get CHINA. 

It just makes a person suspicious. I do not claim this as any sort of evidence. Nor do I claim there is a secret plot to continually pump money into the military industrial complex. I speak only of a particular mindset that the US seems to be prone to, one that appears to form part of the structure of our society and culture but which is—at certain key points—more than a little illusory (at least in the form it takes).

6. Speaking of economics, another economic threat that China poses is the possible underminining of dollar hegemony.

See the Financial Times “China  Advances in Challenge to Dollar Hegemony.” June 30, 2021. 

See also this Bloomberg article: 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-07/china-s-rapid-recovery-puts-global-dollar-hegemony-in-doubt?leadSource=uverify%20wall

I can’t help but noticed that the tide turned right at the point China began to challenge dollar hegemony. 

A coincidence? WHO KNOWS! 

Here’s where my priors fail me. I know that dollar hegemony is a major reason for the prosperity (OK the prosperity of some) in the USA. However, I do not know the degree to which this is true. I do not know if this whole thing is about China’s threat to dollar hegemony or what role it plays. 

And I really cannot know. 

I have a lot more priors than these 6. but there’s 

7. A cold war would be a disaster. An actual war—real WWIII as opposed to what everyone’s callling WWIII right now—would be unthinkably catastrophic.  

On some level, based on my priors I think the US is screwing up big time on China. We should not be sabre rattling with China. When has this method ever been long-term successful? 

But the thing is I can’t know. I cannot be sure of anything. I have no solid ground with which to draw a conclusion. 

All I know is when I try to get from A (China engaged in industrial espionage, something Germany and other countries also engage in) to Z (we should have a Cold War with China) I do not see the steps that lead from A to Z. 

I can only be suspicous of the information I receive and what’s behind it. And anxious about what it portends. And the problem is that this is what Americans have to be like, generally—all the time, in fact. We’re so often being lied to. The lies in the past have had some substantial consequences. We actually cannot fully trust our government, even the ‘good guys’ of our government. Not that they are necessarily evil but that they are stupid, Even the people advising them might be ‘merely’ stupid rather than evil. 

And this leads us, eventually, into an attitude of suspicion. This will be the topic of my next lil essay on misinformation and disinformation and why it’s so easy to do. Partly because a standing attitude of suspicion is the most fertile ground for misinformation but the rockiest ground for any hope you will be disabused of the bullshit you have come to believe.