Comment by kstrauser
6 days ago
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
To expound, "black people are more likely to be felons" is only true (in the truest sense of the word "true") given a clear definition of what "likely" means, and the conditions under which the statement is true.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
There's a term for lying with carefully selected truths: Paltering.
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
It also lets the liar try to trap rebuttals with gotchas. In this case, “so you’re saying there aren’t a higher percentage of black people in prison? A-ha! Facts, not feelings!”, or something stupid like that. Then you have to waste time with that, to which they’ll reply, “so you admit they’re more likely, a-ha!”
I’ve found it more effective to just say “you’re wrong” and move on. The end result of the argument is the same, and it gets them all riled up, which is generally what they’d hoped to inflict on others.
True things which make you a jerk (to some) shouldn't be censored to avoid "distorting the conversation". Respondents can explain the context.
I would generally agree, but in many cases 1) people don't read the comments/replies, 2) interesting responses get drowned out by low-quality responses, 3) the criteria by which useful responses get highlighted can be skewed by a variety of factors, including vote brigading and algorithmic bias or sometimes just a bias towards the earliest comments (which get upvotes, which then get more views, which get more upvotes).
The flipslide is trolls will spew out the lies faster than you can rebut them. Much faster. Orders of magnitude faster. The lie is short, pithy, and requires little thought. The truth require context and effort. After a lie has been rebutted several times there is little value in allowing it to be repeated constantly. Eventually the truth tellers get worn down and the lie is allowed to live on in perpetuity, allowing more and more people to believe it over time.
So who gets to be arbiter of truth? and what is the recourse if they are wrong?
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That is a view which is entirely opposed to my own. I have no faith that there is some authoritative entity that could objectively determine what is a lie and what is the truth.
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I agree that the government should not censor statements that don't violated specific laws.
I am strongly convinced that any person or organization has the right to moderate content flowing through the systems they host. If you want to say "I don't believe the Holocaust happened", that should be your legal right. It should be my legal right to tell you, "go get your own soapbox to spout that nonsense. You're not doing it on my dime."