Straw-checking: Difference between revisions

''They do what I call straw-checking, where you assert Proposition A, and then you see a news story appear that says, "fact checkers say that A-prime is not true." You're like, "well, but nobody ever said A prime, we said A." Well, but A-prime sounds like A, and we've checked that A-prime isn't true. Well, that's the strawman. A-prime is what they wanted to check to indicate that A wasn't true. But A '''was''' true.''

''So for example, the lab leak is the perfect example of this. The claim was that this may have come from a laboratory, this virus may have come from a laboratory in Wuhan. The debunked claim was "no individual '''authored''' this virus". That's not the same as saying it didn't come from a lab. You could use natural selection to let evolution design the virus for you by, let's say, selecting for which viral particles in a bat Coronavirus are closest to being able to infect humans by using pulmonary tissue or something like that. That replacing of a question A with A-prime and then debunking A-prime is far worse than misinformation. So I think we have to recognize that we do have obligations to try to figure out what's true, but I don't want to use corporate fact-checking, which is often straw-checking, as a gold standard. We should come up with our own system for what we think we should put out in the air.''

'''Eric Weinstein''' on [https://youtu.be/nz7cheVQ15w?t=356 What Bitcoin Did], released Feb 23, 2022