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Say Goodbye To the Information Age: It's All About Reputation Now (aeon.co)
An anonymous reader shares an essay on Aeon magazine by Gloria Origgi, an Italian philosopher and a tenured senior researcher at CNRS : We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the 'information age', we are moving towards the 'reputation age', in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.
[...] The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from 'fake news' and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
[...] The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from 'fake news' and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
"reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility."
In other words, if it came out of Trump's mouth, it's a lie.
Do you want a gestapo? Because that's how you get a gestapo.
Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).
This is simply arguing for dystopia and forsaking a new Enlightenment, a new Renaissance, because "eh, it's too hard to care."
Reputation is emotional and therefore non-objective. Animals can construct hierarchies based on reputation. We are human beings with all the tools to shape our reality. Why should we forsake our intellect for an animalistic way of life? Because it allows us to be controlled by whoever is at the top of the hierarchy dispensing reputation? This article, this idea, is poison.
mature citizen
she
Yep, this is a propaganda stunt.
The message here is "blindly trust your favorite source, here's a falsely sophisticated argument for why it's okay for YOU, the smart he/she/xe/.... that you are, to do so". If listened to it could have terrible effect on society, especially if its effective on the "tech sector", the people who have pretty much the only jobs that matter in the "second industrial revolution", the people who have the power to contest the will of their employers and prevent dystopia.
If the horrors that mass surveillance + AI + automation offer us are to be averted, it is YOU that are going to have to stand up, and in order to do so, you will need a philosophical grounding in order to coordinate your efforts with your peers.
This trash article is an attempt to subvert that grounding.
This article takes the noble assumption that people actually want the truth instead of the warm, comforting embrace of the self-reaffirming echo chamber. I know more than a few people who turn to questionable news because they don't want their view of the world challenged. As long as these people exist, there will be a market for this sort of information.
For example, the Washington Post was purchased by Jeff Bezos without doing any due diligence, because he didn't buy it as a business, he bought it so that he could be one of those gatekeepers.
The reputation of the Washington Post needs to be re-evaluated in the Bezos era.
Back in my age we called it "argument from authority". And even then we knew that it's bullshit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
then say hello to idiocracy on steroids. Doesn't leave much hope for the species, which really doesn't matter anyway to dead people. So, by all means, go nuts!
We're entering the Age of Bullshit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Humans specialize. Well, almost every creature specializes.
We pick up on something we can get the most out of, or serve the most important role in, and gravitate towards that with our time.
The rest of our time, we peek at the rest of reality, keep an eye on what else we can be doing or thinking about, or could hurt us - but it's still not going to be our real focus until we need it to be.
That's how it's always been - an ancient greek politician is going to see the work of Socrates, and will see it as something he can play politics with, rather than ideas to be appreciated. Heck, at that time and place, that same politician was possibly actually a soldier, who was originally a farmer, pulled away from both focuses, and at that point would be annoyed at everything.
But yeah - most folks only read stuff online because it's been made really easy for them - which is how you get as large a population online as we have now, before the population is just raised on it.
The kids will be alright though - there's plenty in the group who don't care about 99% of it, but on average, they care more, and are willing to stray more into the deeper details, even when they don't specialize.
And the reputation system isn't too bad for any of that either - someone messes with something important, those with reputation do often stand up and start protests that actually do end up mattering, and contributing. It might not look much like it with a Putin worshiping person in control of our largest political party right now - but again, the kids will be alright, where the adults are comparatively mind-bogglingly stupid right now.
It's always been about reputation. The Information Age did not change that.
Dibs on the shooting range in Frontierland
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
And you know what? They are still facts regardless if you like them or vote them down too! Pesky things, facts are.
So now everyone needs to be an investigative journalist or a private investigator?
I think the real problem is confirmation bias.
I think this is more accurate.
Gloria should have published this story with someone more reputable, if she even exists.
The issue isn't that we rely on reputation to decide if something is truth. The issue is it is easier for charlatans to build reputation now a days.
in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others.
So how good is the author's reputation, that we should believe this?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Gloria Origgi brings up an interesting point of discussion. It purports to relate to the 'information age', but it has always been there.
Every time someone asserts a 'fact', we must evaluate their motives. If they don't have a discernable motive, we have to look to the source--where did that 'fact' originate, whose hands did it pass through? It's a tedious process but the only way to begin evaluating that 'fact'.
Unfortunately, we have to continually monitor our own belief in facts. They tend to become rooted to the extent that their source is forgotten. Those of us who adhere to a religion were probably indoctrinated before we were capable of rationally evaluating information. How can we now go back and confront those assumptions?
Thus, entire societies are pawns in a flow of 'information' circulating endlessly, invisibly in the ether causing a contagion that is nearly insurmountable.
Belief is a matter of accepting 'facts' without question. No sensible person would allow this. Every 'fact' can be evaluated for accuracy on a scale, say from 0 to 9. One gathers the best information available and gives a particular fact a value between those numbers. As more information becomes available, the score may change. It is never zero or nine.
But most people are averse to shades of grey. They need up or down; on or off; left or right; and nothing in between. They like slogans and easy solutions. No painful thinking required. If a fact is asserted loud enough, often enough, then it must be true. Educational systems perpetuate this problem by rote learning with no critical thought process allowed.
...omphaloskepsis often...
After that everything fails the sanity check.
The "reputation age".. yeah how long has humanity been playing with reputation? Even in the age of just the internet, astroturfing bots, sock puppets, and shills are a very old thing.
For your average person it is just about feeding people what they want to hear. "Validate my feelings!". If you feel Obama is a Lizard person and Trump is the 2nd coming of Christ.. Well there are people who will validate your feelings with the lies you want to hear (and they have a reputation for this that isn't hurting them).
The information age makes this easier/faster but this has always been around. Thorag Skullsmasher no longer needs that title added to his name. Now he can just post under sock puppet accounts about how Thorag smashes so many skulls and smashes skulls best. Thorag smashes yuge skulls!
That the reputation of Slashdot, it's mods and it's commenters is so low that the whole system is nearly useless.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Ad verecundiam
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/appeals/appeal-to-authority/
I am the most beloved Slashdot commenter and have tremendous reputation, which is why I won the presidency of Slashdot by the biggest margin in history.
You are welcome on my lawn.
After reading, digesting and filtering this article, I pronounce Gloria Origgi a moron.
There are three problems here:
1) The real question is why did the flat earth society decide there was a giant conspiracy. The answer is because they needed to believe that or give up their belief in a flat earth. There may well have been some believers in a flat earth who gave up that belief, but by definition they were no longer members of the flat earth society.
2) Conspiracy theories are dangerous because once you accept the conspiracy, it is impossible to have it disproved. All contrary evidence simply becomes part of the conspiracy.
3) There really are conspiracies in the world. But they don't involve thousands of people because its impossible for that many people to all keep the secret. For a group that large to act together requires a collective self interest and a large amount of transparent activity. Which makes the idea of the moon landing being a conspiracy absurd on its face.
Which brings us to the larger problem. "Reputation" is not an objective reality. Some people think the New York Times has a good reputation, others think Fox News has a good reputation. Those reputations are both based on confirmation bias. Both depend on attracting and holding the attention of an audience for advertisers. That filters out anything that forces their audience to question their world view.
Winston Churchill once said ""In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." The notion that some sources are always reputable and others aren't is a foolish conceit. Objectively, the US military and intelligence services should have zero credibility whether speaking openly or through their chosen media. The notion apparently is that while we may ask them to torture and kill people in the service of their country, they would never lie to us if they thought it was in the country's interest.
Got emmmmmmm!!!!
It's true that this seems to be the shift society is experiencing. This is not limited to just culture but also it seems the hard sciences are getting a taste of this. And it's bad. Really bad. The loss of objectivity is the loss of civilization. The problem is that something can exist both as incorrect and popular (or reputable). We need to focus only on correct/incorrect and not the source of the information.
"Welcome to Costco.... I love you."
- Idiocracy Costco greeter
So what the author is saying is we should learn to think critically and discriminate between ideas.... hmmm...
Sounds like the wisdom of days gone by, no?
It's okay, you don't have to be afraid to take an honest look at facts and make a decision for yourself.
Truth is what it is. It is already subject to agenda manipulation in regular media and mass manipulation in social media.
Because it is a lie and it is accepted widely by a bunch of foolish people - doesn't make it any more meaningful than what it is: a lie.
So stop throwing around dangerous ideas that it has to be vetted by a bunch of people and then it becomes significant: What you are describing is the classic example of a PR campaign which is sure to lead us astray.
It's trash and a route to the same old controls.
I'm under a 3, so Bryce Dallas Howard should want sex with me!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There is a lot of information out there. How do you tell what is true and what is not? You can't be an expert in many fields and instantly know the truth value of an information packet. What gives value to the information packet is how much you trust the reputation of the source. So if this is the information age then yes, reputation is the king. Because it is going to be the reputation that speaks for the reliability and value of that information.
Back to my subject,
Truth is deep. Reputation is shallow. I can't waste time analysing and researching all the information that passes by. I need a quick evaluation of it and that is by reputation.
> Ad verecundiam
Maybe, but it's kind of useless.
1. Because we know all about that (sorry, researcher!);
2. It's not only called reputation, but also karma and some people wanted unpronounceable Gaelic(?) names (ah, yes, thanks Wikipedia: whuffie);
3. And last, it is a source of headaches, since:
3.a. It doesn't work (this site is the ideal place to see it failing every single day) and
3.b. As a corollary, it can be misused to perpetrate all kinds of nastinesses.
IMHO couple months long lobbying for "anti-fake news" agenda doesn't count as a change of socioeconomic paradigm. Neither did war on crime or war on drugs. You're just switching one enemy for another.
They are not making an appeal to authority in this case. They are making an appeal to stupidity and trying to convince them to entrust their discernment and reasoning to others. This in effect makes someone else the gatekeeper of their knowledge and subsequently their opinion. In the information age these news organizations are quickly becoming irrelevant as they no longer are the gatekeepers of information. People are waking up to the fact that we never really had a democracy due to the lies of the previous gatekeepers. This is an argument that has been made in the past by both fascists and socialists. Soon we will have a movement arise that offers one of these as solution to this problem. It will be interesting to see if people fall for the same lies that proliferated politics just 70-90 years ago.
That's what this is. Reputation? Please don't make me laugh! Its all about shit talk and riling people up. This is the Age of Disinformation folks, get used to it.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Sure, it's *totally* different than when almost everybody just trusted the evening news or their favourite newspaper columnist to tell them what to think.
The information age made the raw information available. Many people use it directly. It's not terribly surprising that most people don't have the time, skill, or inclination to do that, so they do as they always have and rely on someone else to interpret it for them. The availability of information has made a change in that area though: now just about anybody can become a reputable source of opinion, no capital broadcasting or publishing infrastructure required. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on who you are and how much faith you have in people.
We've always had tribal reputation outsourcing. The main difference is that we now have tribal reputation outsourcing on crack.
In addition, we've always had a rich vocabulary concerning those who outsource their opinions while exercising insufficient personal vigilance: toady, bootlicker, sycophant, fool, ass, halfwit, dunce, dolt, ignoramus, cretin, moron, imbecile, and mean-girl wannabee (to commence dining with a preliminary cheese plate).
For the soup course, we have on offer a rich gumbo:
* fear
* authoritarian submission
* self-righteousness
* compartmentalized thinking
* hostility
* prejudice
* ethnocentrism
* dogmatism
* our "biggest problem"
* feeling empowered in groups
* insecurity
* lack of critical thinking
* egregious double standards
The other difference is that you no longer have to attend the meetings, the social media mess tent comes to you.
(My background Scrabble brain spied an opportunity to randomly rearrange the jackboot soup recipe to spell out a vile epithet; verily I remain an adult child.)
This is a solved problem.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Good critical thinking should never be abandoned because we defer to the source of the arguments put forth. From many religions to Hitler this has proven over and over again to be a bad road to go down. Completely untrustworthy people can be right sometimes. The most rigid researcher can make a mistake. I agree that truth and validity are becoming more important. The way to recognize them, and to distinguish sound arguments from unsound arguments is to apply good critical thinking skills. Unfortunately Logic is a university level course. It really should be taught in Jr. High, and touched upon in Elementary. This would certainly boost the IQ of the general populace...which is maybe why it isn't taught. Politicians and governments get away with too many things because the people they rule don't seem to have very good bullshit detectors.
We lost it. Get over it. We lost the Internet, we lost the New Frontier, we lost the Information Age. That wonderful new world of equality and free flow of information for all has been snatched away from us forever, and the Zuckerbergs of the world now stand triumphant over the new, reshaped digital world: the prison of the 99% for the benefit of the 1%. Your computer is your warden, your smartphone your chains. Facebook is your lord. Resistance is useless, not to mention impossible because everybody is addicted and those who are not have better become, before they're singled out as "stranger danger". The last battle for freedom has been lost without even having been fought. Shame on us all, willing slaves.
Also, millennial bullshit, clearly. Reputation has always mattered, though your parents never bothered to teach you that. What you don't seem to grasp is that reputation is based on real action in the world, not tweets. It's why no one will hire you. It is beyond irritating that with every ordinary life lesson your cohort encounters, you decree it an 'age of something' and feel compelled to blog endlessly about it. There is nothing special about your journey through life other than the fact that you are mostly all so woefully unprepared to deal with it. I just don't know how the rest of us are going to help you. You are little shits, and dumb ones, at that. The grown ups will continue to think of all of this as simply being life on earth. How some of you can be in your thirties now and still lack anything resembling consciousness or adeptness at anything is the mystery of our times.
Y'all should read this deranged Frenchman who calls himself "Tiqqun". That fellow has some real choice things to say about the fascists at CNRS. Quality shit, my bros.
Good morning, Ivan! How's the weather in Moscow today?
I'd say it works quite well on this site. Idiots are modded down.
I've never heard of Origgi, I don't have a chain of trust or a conspiracy theory about her, and being featured on Slashdot is a bad predictor. Miraculously I can still tell that what she says is bullshit.
It always WAS about reputation. People used to read and trust news from ACCREDITED SOURCES ONLY. Only since Facebook and the death of print has this changed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Let it not be forgotten that the primacy of information remains, but the gatekeepers of primary information are becoming increasingly specialized and dispersed throughout the social graph. One of the problems here is not that information is waning, but that the social internet deluge refuses to wane.
The Purpose of Mathematics in a Classical Education — 1 March 2017 by Thomas Treloar
The expectation used to be that an educated person could somehow manage to cram the essential information working-set into their brain's as a young adult, and that would provide a solid (and shared) operational basis throughout adulthood. In modern mathematics, one often sees Poincare mooted as the last universalist.
No longer do we even cram the essence of one field into our brains all at once.
One approach to this conundrum is just to accept that you're working at second (or third, or fourth) hand most of the time. The other is to dump the knowledge itself, and turn your brain into a glorified index-card compendium: rarely to have the knowledge, but to have the Knowledge about where it lives (which is rarely more than three inspired search keywords and a click or two away).
The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS — November 2014
PBS's edumentary The Brain with David Eagleman (2015) has a segment on neurological change induced by this learning process (not a small effect, either). The specific subject of this giant, journalistic wall-of-text from turns out to be a crazy man:
Nevertheless, I relate to his endeavour. Half of the time on the Internet, I feel like a "butter boy" endlessly committing to mind the knowledge graph. Not the knowledge itself, just the graph, with just a little help from my own personal wiki.
Strangely, the key organizational principle in my wiki is a social graph: the names of people who discovered or wrote things. People make for the best landmarks. This was reinforced for me by a remark in a Bryan Cantrill video, where he said "corporations don't innovate, people do". I've borne this maxim in mind ever since. When a corporation talks about corporate innovation, ask yourself who the people are. If you don't know, you're being sold a bill of goods. Why is clang so great? Because it was Chris Lattner, as supported by Apple, and not some generic Apple product team. And usually when the key people leave, the innovation does, too. So my social graph consists of the people
The premise that "news" should be trusted if it comes from a trusted source overlooks that a trusted source can be corrupted and used for ulterior motives.
If you can't understand this you're just plain stupid and naive.
That's all the time I am going to waste on this, except to say that Slashdot has become nearly pure shit in recent years.
Chris, you can't be that naive, can you?
It is the fundamental difference between getting information and understanding information. Many would imply that they are one and the same but there is a huge difference. Just reading about something gives your a very basic view of something but hardly makes you an expert or even qualifies to understand the underlying facts. Too many people think that a little reading makes you qualified to extend the facts you are given to other circumstances, or to make extended predictions. When often the facts you read while true may only be so in a very narrow focus or set of circumstances. One needs to be assured that the facts we are given apply to a very narrow set of circumstances before claiming to be an expert in anything.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I've been in IT for 20 years. I have absolutely zero online profile, social media account, or domain/personal website and I've experienced no ill effects. Everyone says you need to have this or the other, but I've never felt the need. I don't need to have others vet my thoughts and feelings for them to be worth something to me. And no employer I know would ever deign to not hire someone because they have no online presence with maybe the exception of marketing or PR. I'm a systems administrator and that I want to stay. I no designs on management, dealing with people or sitting in multiple weekly meetings. I make enough to be happy and do what I want/need to do.
The only fair way to get people to post true comments is to force all theose reading the comments to provide their real identity, if the poster is forced to provide their real identity.
Haven't you heard, Ivan? Slashdot management had IP banned creimer from posting anonymous comments.
When I look into Europe then it does seem to be this time of the century again. Bigotry and fascism (socialism and fascism are not mutually exclusive anyway) is on the rise again and fuelled by propaganda through filtered information and flat out lies from both inside and outside interest groups. So far it has not gotten as bad as in the last century but this century is still quite young.
Being a first-comer is not something to brag about around the ladies.
What is best in life? Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
I think this has come about, because the US News agencies, have had their TV broadcasts reregistered from News programs to Entertainment programs. They no longer need to broadcast actual news, but instead are broadcasting enterainment.
A more important issue is, how do people keep getting advanced degrees, and high-level academic positions, when their comments show us that they are obviously idiots? Are degrees being handed out in cereal boxes now? History and neurobiology faculties in particular seem to be overflowing with low-quality graduates.
"What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility."
There is just too much information out there to do anything but rely on others to synthesize it and give us a result. That is why reputation is so important. We cannot possibly even do what this author so easily calls on us to do from the comfort and speed of his/her/its computer communications. It is easy to write the impossible as a "should do."
E Proelio Veritas.
So we're moving to this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHuy4hswDTE
This is an old idea, and we've already seen an iteration of it. Likely there is a pendulum swing between individual effort and curation. I remember the early days of the Internet, when search engines basically sucked. Then along came Google, which was more relevant to an order of magnitude. Relevance, very similar to reputation. Back then I used to observe that given a flood of information of varying reliability, relevance (Or reputation if you will) becomes a valuable commodity. This was Google's early competitive advantage.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The problem is it's always filtered by those that have CONTROL, and not by those that are correct. You will understand this when somebody that is smart publishes something like the cure for cancer, but your family members die because the gatekeepers decided to censor it because they don't like how it's worded, or they just don't agree with it.
A majority of people are usually wrong.
What will AT&T, Verizon, and Microsoft do now?
It seems clear that a large percentage of average Americans are simply not interested in facts, and and instead decide what news to trust only on whether something has "truthiness", how it makes them feel, and mostly whether it happens to support or at least not question their own already formulated world view.
You can see exactly the same effect here on slashdot.
Any post that demonstrates actual evidence for validity of thinking outside of the PeeCee mainstream agenda will nearly garner multiple -1 troll mods, even if it is politely written and factually correct, apparetly because its reporting a fact that someone simply doesn't like.
This has always been this way:
The only thing that changed is that in the past there were natural barriers and thresholds for idiots "online". Now there are none, so the problem is solved by artificial "reputation" measurements.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Back when I went to school we were taught to do research. We walked into the library, opened the encyclopedia, and if it said that the Indians and Pilgrims shared a meal of thanks, helped each other, made friends and lived happily ever after - and we could provide a Bibliography to prove we got that info from a "proper" source - then that's how it happened. People have a LOT more source-material at their hands - some good - some bad - and they have to LEARN how to sift through it themselves. Reputation is ONE way to do this - but as we're discussing - reputation is only a single weight that has to be managed when scrutinizing material.
Read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
It's all about the Whuffie...
Has no one mentioned Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?
Well someone should do that!
-
Read "Moon Moth" by Jack Vance - are we indeed going there? Time to pull out the double-kamanthil.
The author E. M. Forster predicted this sort of attitude in his 1909 novella "The Machine Stops". Part of the story revolves around the exchange of ideas. However, new ideas are looked down upon, as they have not been thought about by lots of people. The attitude was almost that it was not necessary for people to actually think about the ideas, but the chain of passing from one brain to another was enough to give an idea value. We appear to be approaching something similar today.
Some idiots are modded down, other ones start at 1 (or 2!).
Some post really insightful comments, but such insights will never be read because many folks don't care about reading BS to mine a knowledge nugget...
What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is spotting and confirming the veracity of the news AND reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that lent it credibility. BECAUSE doing so helps verify the truth of the matter, which is the ultimate goal.
There. Fixed it for her.
On the surface, I have to agree that a web of trust would be really handy when it comes to weeding out bullshit. And I think everyone does this passively to some extent. We all know a few news sources which are full of bullshit. And hey, I trust foxnews.... to put a spin on stories of a certain flavor. Take that into account and you can learn a lot about what's going on in the world as well as how groups of people view it. And just because I used to hold CNN in high regard doesn't mean that they can't change their ways.
But the end-goal remains the discovery of what is true. Don't lose sight of that. If an absolute pile of scum and deluded bigotry and willful ignorance says something that's true, it doesn't stop being true. If you distrust someone, but verify what they said, that can be a very powerful learning experience. And we want that right? All those bigotted, hill-billy rural hicks prepping for the purge and societal collapse due to satanically influenced socialists... They don't trust us, but we want them to research and verify the facts. Right?