The Book That Changed My Life (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

oh, p.s.

the archives (of aaronsw.com) appear to be broken. stuff from before 4/04 comes up just fine; after that, nothing.

yours in the struggle.

posted by vlorbik on May 18, 2006 #

I read Manufacturing Consent, and saw the documentary, several years ago, and while my experience was not so emotionally charged, I can attest that it is an eye-opening and paradigm-breaking experience.

I think, though, that you’ve neglected to mention Chomsky’s basic thesis: that the U.S. media, far from being scrappy and independent, very closely parrots the preferred world-view of the politically and economically powerful. The core of the movie is not just an analysis of the tragedy in East Timor, nor the U.S.’s support. East Timor is paired (with Cambodia, if I remember correctly) as an illustration of the basic thesis: while East Timor was being decimated and the U.S. media took a pro-Polynesian line (in line with the official U.S. government line), an almost identical tragedy was receiving very different press coverage in the U.S. (Cambodia, or wherever, was recognized and denounced as a tragedy).

The book offers perhaps a dozen such paired examples: client states of the U.S. commit an atrocity, and get praised; client states of a U.S. “enemy” commit an almost identical atrocity and are denounced as monsters. In every case, the media follows the “party line” of the U.S. political and economic elite.

It’s a compelling argument, yet very difficult to validate, at least for this reader. It certainly places both liberal and conservative criticisms of the bias of the media in a new light: they’re both wrong.

posted by Yob on May 22, 2006 #

Well, maybe we can proceed by you pointing out which of those beliefs is wrong. It’s hard to respond to “some of your beliefs may be wrong”; an obvious fact.

That’s unfalsifiable? Chomsky doesn’t simply claim such things, instead he writes deeply factual books filled with careful studies of which this might be a conclusion. He points to the people of power whose job is to do this and quotes their own writings where they describe it in this way. In short, he provides evidence, which can be evaluated on its merits.

You seem to fail to lack a fundamental principle of morality, namely, you’re primarily responsible for your own actions. Yes, this principle is uncomfortable but I think it’s also uncontestable. If I kill a man and then say I killed him, would you complain that I “play up this [personal] angle to the hilt, while ignoring other possibly more malevolent forces [like the fact that I was on drugs at the time]”?

This is not the place for a long discussion on Cambodia, but your apparent standard that if someone is ever wrong about something it “extinguish[es their] credibility” and makes further enthusiasm for them “irrational” seems an awfully high bar. Can you name a single public figure who has never been wrong about anything?

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 22, 2006 #

(Incidentally, your standard extinguishes the credibility of that Cambodia document, which previously claimed, incorrectly, that the New York Times reviewed 30 books calling the US role in Indochina a war crime.)

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 22, 2006 #

wake the world b4 it’s 2 late. staunch unionst seeks humanity b4 it’s snuft out.seek truth. tks aaron 4leading a great sight.your mate in unity

posted by danny mitchell on May 23, 2006 #

You seem to fail to lack a fundamental principle of morality, namely, you’re primarily responsible for your own actions. Yes, this principle is uncomfortable but I think it’s also uncontestable. If I kill a man and then say I killed him, would you complain that I “play up this [personal] angle to the hilt, while ignoring other possibly more malevolent forces [like the fact that I was on drugs at the time]”?

This is quite insufficient. While we are responsible for our actions, intellectuals are additionally and especially responsible for sorting out the objective truth, that would help guide our actions. But I am just echoing Bruce Sharp’s point:

Certainly there is merit to the idea that we should be more concerned with our own morality, rather than that of our enemies. But the wider implications of this seem to be lost on many of Chomsky’s supporters: If we admire Chomsky — if his viewpoint is “our” viewpoint — then we should be deeply concerned with ensuring that it is fair and accurate.

I’m actually not able to make much sense of your example. First, it involves only two parties (you and the guy you kill) rather a third (China or Russia), which was the point I was getting at. I also find it difficult to consider that your being on drugs is more malevolent than murdering him while sober. So that code doesn’t even compile. How about you punch a guy in the face, and later he dies? How much effort should you put into agonizing over your moral status if between those two events, someone else came along and hit him on the head with a sledge hammer? Perhaps you are morally culpable on some level, but you need all the information first.

This is not the place for a long discussion on Cambodia, but your apparent standard that if someone is ever wrong about something it “extinguish[es their] credibility” and makes further enthusiasm for them “irrational” seems an awfully high bar. Can you name a single public figure who has never been wrong about anything?

I believe any fair reading of Sharp’s essay leads to a far more damning conclusion than that Chomsky was simply mistaken about some simple point of fact at any one time. (Mistakes go in many directions, bias in one.) Likewise, your quip about the 30 book reviews leads me to conclude that you have no substantial criticism of that essay. I mean, if this is the best you can do…

A word on “facts” is in order here. Following my last comment, I became aware that you had earlier offered a cash prize for any factual errors in Chomsky’s published works. I re-read Sharp’s essay, assuming it would be easy to find a few. Actually, it wasn’t. While the misrepresentations of Shawcross and Sydney Schanberg come the closest to qualifying, and the Znet material is of course off-limits, Chomsky’s real errors are those of profound bias. Consider that there are no factual errors whatsoever in the maddeningly encapsulated paragraph marked with footnote #111, despite the monstrousness of its enclosed assertions.

And clearly no, this is not a place for a long discussion on Chomsky’s views on Cambodia, since that argument has already taken place at length. I will note, however, one point of Sharp’s that resonates for me personally. Even I was aware, albeit obliquely, of negative media coverage of the American bombing campaign in Cambodia, despite being eight years old at the time. It was one of the reasons my parents were furious with Nixon, and thrilled to see him resign soon afterwards. (After all, it was not just Watergate that labeled him a criminal.) They seemed to form this view on a steady diet of the NY Times and the evening news.

By contrast, even as I became older and politically sensitive I had only the dimmest idea of what happened in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge took over. Even after the Vietnamese invasion, when the genocide was fully revealed to the world, I was only aware there was some sort of controversy about the matter. Maybe it was the teen hormones starting to kick in and addle my brain, but it just wasn’t front and center. Indeed, it was precisely to figure out what had happened in the region that I took up Chomsky’s book in the first place, as I mentioned in my first comment. I was especially drawn to the book because he was a well-known commenter on the region. Had I known what really happened, I wouldn’t have made it more than a few pages in before throwing down the book in disgust.

Of course one account does not make for a careful study, but it doesn’t seem likely these responses would be possible if there were a highly effective and monolithic system of propaganda in place minimizing America’s culpability in the region, while at the same time demonizing the Khmer Rouge. The continued assertion otherwise is one of the many reasons I find Chomsky so unreasonable, my original point.

posted by Mike Sierra on May 23, 2006 #

If Chomsky was indeed not telling the truth, that would be a serious charge, but you’d have to provide some evidence for it. Which is why I created the challenge.

That 30 books error isn’t the only error in the piece, but it’s the only one I got him to correct.

I don’t see how its assertions are monsterous. It’s a suggestion of a reasonable possibility. Perhaps, you may argue, a possibility completely at odds with the facts we know now, but nonetheless a possibility.

I read Chomsky because he provides facts that no one else does. If his facts are correct, why should I stop reading?

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 23, 2006 #

That 30 books error isn’t the only error in the piece, but it’s the only one I got him to correct.

What’s laughable here is that in your challenge, you require us to supply material errors, those that are “relevant to the point [Chomsky is] making, not a typo or a misspelling, the kind we all make.” What kind of error is this one you’re describing? That it was actually 33 rather than 30 books, or that they were reviewed in the New York Review of Books rather than the New York Times? How does either revelation alter the substance of Sharp’s point?

I don’t see how its assertions are monsterous. It’s a suggestion of a reasonable possibility. Perhaps, you may argue, a possibility completely at odds with the facts we know now, but nonetheless a possibility.

No, actually it’s a possibility completely at odds with facts that were well established in 1979, when After the Cataclysm went to press. Hence the device in which he offers a positive review of a nonexistent book: it’s a series of statements that clearly can’t stand as a direct assertion. And of course it’s nominally true “the Khmer Rouge programs [may have] elicited a positive response from some sectors of the Cambodian peasantry,” so long as as at least one peasant benefitted in any way. But this is nothing but dissembling double-talk. After all, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 elicited a positive response from some Russians.

(BTW, we have now just established the intellectual integrity of the Bush administration, since the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a reasonable possibility in 2003, or a suggestion thereof. Charges of systematic bias are unfounded.)

I read Chomsky because he provides facts that no one else does. If his facts are correct, why should I stop reading?

Need I repeat for you the difference between being nominally correct on a specific set of factual matters and being intellectually honest? And by no means am I asking you to stop reading him. I am asking you to read him more critically. And yes, I have provided evidence that Chomsky has been far less than truthful.

posted by Mike Sierra on May 23, 2006 #

I’m not sure why we’re spending so much time on an aside, but it does seriously affect his point. He was claiming that the mainstream media lavished attention on the subject — the NYT reviewed 30 books! Well, actually, it was the New York Review of Books, a completely different outlet which published Chomsky in those days. So it’s hardly mainstream attention at all and his point is just wrong.

If you agree that Chomsky is factually correct, then I don’t see what we have to discuss.

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 23, 2006 #

While no doubt lower circulation than the Times, the NYRB was still a highly influential publication, and quite revered in the circles I grew up in, perhaps on par with The New Yorker, albeit less entertaining. But no matter. The salient point is that there were well over two dozen books on the market that might support the idea that America’s bombing of Cambodia was a war crime. Not, say, the one or two you might expect for an issue pushed out to the margins in an atmosphere of pervasive propaganda. So I still dispute its relevance.

If you agree that Chomsky is factually correct, then I don’t see what we have to discuss. Since, characteristically, you responded to one part of my prior comment, you can’t not have read the other part.

posted by Mike Sierra on May 23, 2006 #

What I find strange is that you’re so into Noam Chomsky and yet you support capitalism (Or at least this has been my impression). Chomsky is an anarchist and he doesn’t simply advocate policy reform but radical change to society.

posted by anon on May 23, 2006 #

I’m not sure if Chomsky is really an anarchist, since I’ve heard him (self?) described as an “anarchist socialist,” which strikes me as an oxymoron. But there’s no particular conflict between anarchism and capitalism, from what I understand, the latter term understood as less power ceded to government.

Aaron: I’ve posted some second thoughts on our exchange here. It’s not exactly charitable towards your position, but somewhat less towards mine. For what it’s worth…

posted by Mike Sierra on May 30, 2006 #

Aaron, I note in your replies both here and, more explicitly, at Mike Sierra’s aforementioned blog post your belief that (as you put it over in Mike’s comments) you “acknowledge that bias exists, but it’s a […] far less important [subject] than simple falsehood.” I wonder if you could elaborate on the thinking that brought you to the decision that technical inaccuracy is a bigger problem than bias (either here, or in a new post). Just a thought, and thank you for engaging in dialogue.

posted by Mike Sugarbaker on May 31, 2006 #

That’s an interesting question. There are pragmatic reasons for not worrying about bias (it’s tough to define, it’s harder to prove, it’s not directly relevant, etc.) but you asked why I think it’s less of a problem. The reason is that it’s easier to combat.

Let’s say I tell you that Joe found me sitting in a restaurant, sat down at my table, called me an idiot, ate some of the food I’d ordered, and then left without paying for anything. It sounds pretty bad. But if I am biased but still honest, Joe can redeem himself simply by pointing out that he stumbled upon the restaurant by accident, I waved him over, he was joking about the idiot remark (and said it in a friendly way), I invited him to have some food, and he had to dash off to a meeting and offered to pay but I told him not to worry about it. In one simple sentence, the tale is totally turned around. Not do you side with Joe on the issue, but you also begin to trust me less.

By contrast, let’s say I was outright lying. Joe could respond that the whole thing wasn’t true, he never saw me in a restaurant, etc., but that’s far less convincing. Now you know one of us is lying but you’re not sure who and it’s tempting to just throw your hands up and not worry about it too much, or to simply take my word for it because I’m your friend.

The implications for politics should be clear.

As for me, when people are merely biased I find it frustrating but not disastrous. I read a lot of stuff and I’ll often get the other side of the story soon enough. But when people lie or consistently tell falsehoods — well, I find that extremely problematic and I’ll try to avoid reading their stuff in the future, lest my brain get filled up with “facts” that simply aren’t true.

posted by Aaron Swartz on May 31, 2006 #

I’ve felt the same way, although not from Chomsky’s books, though, no doubt, he provides a contrarian viewpoint and strikes many good points.

For me, it was back in the 80s, reading a book by Jonathan Kwitney (a former WSJ reporter) titled Endless Enemies, a real eye opening book that detailed American interventionalist follies around the world, and it made a big impression upon me, shattering the illusion that American foreign policy was based on lofty principles of freedom and justice. Instead, carnal money grubbing desires are at the root of political manuevers, and the U.S., while in relative terms, may be “cleaner” than other historical nations, has engaged in nefarious plots in service of monied interests.

Recently, another book I read shook me in a similar fashion - The Secret War Against the Jews by John Loftus. Not that I agreed with all the speculation offered by the author, based on his network of “old spies”, but much of the book chimed true with other works from ex-CIA/NSA insiders. Stuff that fits into “follow the money” paradigm of viewing world history.

posted by naum on June 1, 2006 #

I disagree that bias is easier to rectify. Verifying facts involves focusing on a narrow set of assertions — whether Joe called you an idiot, left without paying, etc. — while identifying bias means you have to have a much wider scope of information available to you, which is inherently harder. Consider that if a reporter wrote up the story you initially presented, it would pass a fact-checker, but not an alert editor. Also consider that if you wrote a book called “Joe is a Bad Man” containing that set of facts, and you offered $50 to anyone able to identify a factual error in it, you’d be able to keep your money.

posted by Mike Sierra on June 2, 2006 #

In that very post I said “bias [i]s tough to define, it’s harder to prove”, just like you argue. But that has nothing to do with rectifying.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 2, 2006 #

Truly maddening. You said that bias is “easier to combat,” despite its more vague definition. By “combat,” I assume you mean to “recognize” bias, which allows us to correct for it, i.e., “rectify.”

posted by Mike Sierra on June 2, 2006 #

Well, you assumed wrong. What I meant by combat should be clear from the example I gave: providing a response that fills in the gaps of the biased narrative, thus allowing the audience to get a less biased understanding of what’s going on. No explicit recognition or rectification is necessary.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 2, 2006 #

I actually believe we’re both talking about the same thing: the effect on the audience rather than on the source of the information. When you “respond” to the narrative by filling in the gaps, you implicitly “recognize” the information is incomplete, and you are doing something to “rectify” that shortcoming. Are we using the same language now? (Sheesh, and from a writer, no less!)

In your comment on my blog, you wondered to which of my points you failed to respond, and offered to rectify the situation. Perhaps here would be a good place to start. After “I disagree that bias is easier to rectify,” there are three other sentences. Are there any problems with any of them?

posted by Mike Sierra on June 3, 2006 #

No, which is why I said I agree with them.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 3, 2006 #

…which is why I said I agree with them. Okay, I give up: exactly where did you say you agreed with them? From comment #29 on, I see nothing. In particular, where did you agree that your Chomsky challenge is an unreliable test for intellectual honesty, focusing as it does on the veracity of a selected set of facts, and leaving out questions of sample bias? Just checking….

posted by Mike Sierra on June 3, 2006 #

Mike Sierra now asks if the Chomsky challenge “is a []reliable test for intellectual honesty” considering it doesn’t include the issue of bias. I never said it was; I’m not even sure what intellectual honesty precisely means in this context. The Chomsky Challenge page explains what motivates the contest and its specific rules. Neither the word “intellectual” nor “honest” appears.

If Mike wants to define some rules for intellectual honesty and some tests for bias, perhaps we could discuss them and then apply them to various people. But, unlike the issue of factual errors (for which there are numerous formal procedures for identifying and correcting and so on), I can’t say I’ve seen any rules for proving “intellectual dishonesty”. Let me know if you have.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 3, 2006 #

Aaron, over in my blog’s comments you said: If you have evidence of Chomsky’s dishonesty, please take the Chomsky challenge! All I’m demonstrating is that’s a non sequitur, since much evidence of dishonesty may fall outside the scope of your test.

posted by Mike Sierra on June 3, 2006 #

I don’t see how you got from “dishonesty” to “intellectual dishonesty” to “bias”, but whatever.

posted by Aaron Swartz on June 3, 2006 #

Yes, whatever. I was hoping to obtain a copy of Manufacturing Consent today, but none was available at my local library or book store, and Google hasn’t scanned it. Can you (or anyone) tell me if the following passage appears on pp. 281-282?

In that article we were clear and explicit, as also subsequently, that refugee reports left no doubt that the record of Khmer Rouge atrocities was “substantial and often gruesome,” and that “in the case of Cambodia, there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.”

posted by Mike Sierra on June 3, 2006 #

The passage quoted in my prior comment (#c38), which I believe would have passed your challenge, has been corrected in the 2002 edition. (The revised prose in that section is less than forthright, but that’s a story for another day.) I’m going on vacation for a week, and wanted to settle as much as I could before I left. Woe unto anyone else reading this, but here goes…

Regarding your email from 6/3, yes, I share your frustration in our ability to communicate. One example: commenting on my blog on your state of knowledge about the Khmer Rouge, you said you weren’t “following the news when it was a big story and … haven’t ever looked into it since.” By “big story,” were you referring to Pol Pot’s death in ‘98, the recent effort to bring surviving leaders to justice, or were you unaware the Khmer Rouge were toppled years before you were born? The mere fact that you just sent me email referring to me repeatedly in the third person by my proper name, as if it were a public comment, was itself mildly disorienting.

In your #c29 comment, you only said you agreed that bias was difficult to define and to prove, an uncontroversial point. You said nothing that would lead me to believe you agreed with my statement noting the Chomsky challenge’s limitations in detecting bias, on which much dishonesty may be based. If you meant otherwise, you were unclear. I really had no idea what you were talking about.

Yes, bias may be accidental or intentional (as factual error can), and I’m sorry if I interchanged the words “bias” and “dishonesty” in a confusing way. Still, the “Joe Is a Bad Man” counter-example I provided, the one to which you supposedly gave your assent, clearly represents dishonesty, since you would have been present at the encounter with Joe and thus well aware of reasons he called you an idiot and left without paying.

You still seem fixated on making hair-splitting distinctions among words like “identify,” “combat,” “recognize,” and “rectify” as they relate to bias, and I thought I had been as clear as possible that we’re talking about the same thing. There’s simply no way you can combat bias without implicitly recognizing/identifying a lack of relevant information in whatever set is being presented. That may just mean reading two articles rather than one.

As for “rectify,” the only misreading I could think of is to get a biased source to correct itself, a meaning I ruled out in my #c32 comment: to rectify is to correct the imbalanced set of information reaching the audience, to “correct for” the bias rather than correct it at the source. (I don’t know if that’s a source of misunderstanding.)

Regarding your #c35 comment, I’m not suggesting in any way you should try to craft a Chomsky Challenge that might detect bias. Indeed, I think the difficulty in crafting such a test generally supports the notion that bias is a more difficult problem with which to grapple.

In your email you claimed I did not offer an argument backing up my observation that bias is harder to rectify. The argument I offered is a simple one: that validating facts requires far less information on hand than checking for bias, which requires familiarity with a wider range of relevant information. (To which I may add you need wisdom in weighing the sources.) While I appreciate the difficulties you mentioned that are involved in gathering facts, I get the strong impression the filters we put in place are more of a problem.

posted by Mike Sierra on June 6, 2006 #

Thanks

posted by Yacob Mekonene on September 13, 2006 #

Thank you for the recommendation. I’ve read some Chomsky and I’ve put “Understanding Power” in the queue. Perhaps interestingly, the same thing - a sense of isolation and helplesness when it comes to communicating my newly found wisdom - happened to me after reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Pynchon. It’s a book I’ve repeatedly heard lauded as a classic of literature, but turns out very few people have actually read it through and even less let themselves understand it.

posted by Goran Zec on September 24, 2006 #