You want the truth? Assume the opposite of what is reported.

I have posted a couple of times on the obvious unreliability of mortality data from Gaza for several months (see The virtuousness of blatant misandry and Basic stats, historical knowledge, and situational awareness beats propaganda all the time as examples.)  Now the UN has acknowledged what was known and knowable months ago.  That they have been relying on false data provided by Hamas which dramatically overstate conditions in Gaza.

Hamas-UN Bullshit Blood Libel by Robert F. Graboyes covers the details of the update.  The subheading is The United Nations casually concedes the falsity of its incendiary Gaza casualty data.  He has lots of links to additional sources including, Lifting Hamas’s ‘Fog of War’ Reveals a Very Different Conflict

by Seth Mandel.  

From Mandel:

It’s possible, then—perhaps even likely—that the IDF has achieved a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of around 1.5-1, an unheard-of level of precision and civilian protection in urban warfare.

Mandel further notes:

If that’s the case, it should cause the Biden administration to rethink its hypercritical posture toward Israel. Except—and here’s the bad news—the Biden administration already knew this information. Again: The missing 11,000 or so casualties were largely based, according to Hamas, on media reporting. In other words, rumor—not unidentified corpses. This was not a secret. The Biden administration and the UN were both well aware of Hamas’s method of fabrication. Which means President Biden has been knowingly using false numbers to crucify Israel in the court of public opinion and to justify withholding weapons from our ally during wartime.

Like all news in recent years, this story about Gaza mortality rates seems to follow a familiar pattern.  Reports are made based on known-to-be-suspect or unreliable sources which are treated as facially true.  Immediately, those with some numeracy and/or statistical knowledge as well as those with some domain knowledge and/or historical knowledge, raise counterarguments to the naive initial reports.

The informed objections are promptly ignored and or called into question based not on technical inaccuracy, but on putative motivated thinking.  Weeks, months, or years later, the initial reporting is turned completely on its head and the arguments made by the skeptics are sustained.  

And we ignore that the entire public discourse was substantially shaped by lies propagated, or at least amplified, by the legacy mainstream media and by academia in concert with activist NGOs and the like.

It increasingly seems like the safest epistemic rule of thumb for newly reported news is to assume that the very opposite of that being reported is the truth.

I know a charming woman who in her youth was completely flummoxed by economic theory.  Perplexed to the extent that she adopted an uncommon epistemic approach when taking economics exams.  Her rule was - Whatever she thought the answer ought to be, write the opposite.  As a measure of her understanding of the underlying theory of economics, it was a mockery.  As a mechanism for achieving perfect scores, it was abysmal.  

But as a means of actually passing the exams?  It worked.  To her delight and to the distress of her professors.  

Feels like we are in a similar epistemically topsy-turvy world when it comes to news reporting these days.