> “In the Iraq war, I was on the side of what you would think, on the mainstream is misinformation, I was promoting what they would call misinformation, but it turned out to be right …
Really loosing a lot of respect for Steward on this stance.
Misinformation does not just mean “the unpopular opinion” it’s perfectly fine to distribute your opinion that even though vaccines have been proven effective you don’t want you take one.
Misinformation is willfully lying to push your agenda, that means both when you are in the majority and when you are in the minority. Like spreading false claims about WMDs. If you go out claiming that vaccines are unproven when the medical consensus is the exact opposite, then it’s misinformation.
As for “who gets to decide” that’s a great question. I mean the field of physics and Mathematica where quite lost until we all agreed to have the Pope decide the truth or falsehood of all information. So I suggest we also just let him decide what is misinformation. Or maybe, just maybe, there is a process of deducing what is true and what is false, that does not depend on the personal political opinion of the person making the decision, perhaps we could try those?
And I know what your thinking’s but what if facts change?! What if tomorrow we discover that the covid vaccines do cause autism? Well then we update our view of what is information and what is disinformation. We don’t allow children to get by lying about getting an A in math when they got a C just because LMaybe they’ll get an A later and turn their lie into a truth” that’s not how it works.
The people spreading misinformation are lying based on our currently known facts. Which is why we can call them out on it.
But he's not entirely wrong. Stewart calls out the NYT for being wrong on Iraq; and they were. Today they are still the newspaper of record (for a lot of people) and they're still devastatingly wrong about all kinds of issues, on a daily basis.
I have a deep contempt for the motley collection of anti-(vaxxer, masker, etc etc) that have surfed to the top of a wave of distrust and ignorance. But I'll concede that even they have some points about how, for instance, the CDC had abominably bad communication about masks in the early days of the pandemic, and the "trusted" sources wholeheartedly amplified some obviously stupid ideas.
... that said, I think you're right. Stewart wants to make this issue all about him and his past valor in the fight for truth, all while implying that it's somehow wrong to even try to establish who's right. It's a dumb take, and I can only hope he's not in the early stage of some Scott Adams-esque drift into misinformation cult territory.
As for my own answer to "who to trust", I daydream about finding some new subculture that contains experts who know very different things than I do; people I can look to, to tell me "this is how it is" about any given complex issue. An idealistic dream of what the internet could be, basically. It's possible to sort of get there through a patchwork individual blogs / newsletters / etc, but it's extremely high friction and time intensive, and that hasn't improved much in 20+ years of life on the internet.
