wretchard @7:

I’ve been thinking about a more basic problem. How do we know how much of what we’re told is the truth?

About 30 years ago I stopped watching local TV; the S/N ratio was vanishingly low and the value of the information in the signal was too low to justify the time spent to acquire it.

About 25 years ago I stopped watching CBS,NCB,ABC national news; the S/N ratio was not good, but the main problem was that the signal (1) poorly sampled reality, and (2)was then distorted (we say slanted now). CNN was better for a while …

About 7 or 8 years ago, I realized that an AP byline meant the signal was often maskirovka – intentionaly distorted or just made up out of whole cloth. And that this appears to be not just an accasional lapse, but systematic. AP now means propaganda to me.

I now expect incompetence (accidental injection of noise) plus active misrepresentation (biased sampling plus intentional injection of noise and intentional signal distortion) from most of the media. I automatically put a very low confidence weight on anything from the MSM.

Its an interesting situation vis-a-vis your question above. How does one get a reasonable picture of reality?

Its one of the reasons I read this site. I don’t know of a good way to counter the sampling problem, but The Belmont Club (and other internet sources) combine into sort of a neural network that provides the best signal detectors I know of.