Fact checking is a worse-than-useless approach to counter programming bullshit. Brandolini bullshit assymmetry principle —“It takes 10x more effort to refute bullshit than to produce it” — applies doubly to fact-checking, so like 100x. You need better refutation models.
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This is why the Alec Baldwin impersonations gotunder Trump’s skin. His moves were made legible through exaggerated imitation. For example, Trump’s been repeating “cupboards were bare”. He goes figurative when numbers tell a complicated wonky story that don’t obviously help him.
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It’s a figure of speech so it’s not a lie. There’s no point arguing how many ventilators and masks in the stockpile cross the “bare cupboard” figurative threshold. Playing that game is guaranteed to bore peop,e so he wins by default. So what do you do? You mock the *pattern*
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How would you script an Alec Baldwin SNL sketch for this? Like this perhaps: “the cupboard was bare, the shelves were empty, even the desk drawers in the Oval Office desk were empty. Obama used up the pencils. I had to buy my own pencils. Took me 3 years to do that.”
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It’s not the best joke, which is why I’m not an SNL writer, but you get the idea. You can’t fact-check a slippery mix of facts, figures, and figures of speech.
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For b, there’s no substitute for investigative digging, whistleblowing, etc. Every big thing he stonewalls on, he also runs a project of interference, obstruction, intimidation, etc. So far he’s won by the “absence of evidence” logic (absence he’s engineered). He’s blameless.
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Trump by himself is unimportant now. He’s done his damage for his handler Mitch, and is already in the trash can of history. But he’s installed a culture of bullshitting that so far has no cure or vaccine 4 years in. Time to build a refutation playbook that actually works.
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And yes, this thread is bullshit too. Takes some bullshit to fight bullshit. White-hat bullshit like Alec Baldwin’s impressions. https://twitter.com/karlmaeser/status/1252390816795918336?s=21 …https://twitter.com/KarlMaeser/status/1252390816795918336 …
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Definitely. This was the argumentative jiu-jitsu I learned against trolls in 2016.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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I’ve wanted to do this to specific, highly followed fortune-cookie posters on here - but they are also very touchy about blocking. I guess you just have to make the one shot count?
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People well below trump levels of power can probably be safely ignored
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