How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Towards Measuring Statement Coherence via Spatial Analysis

1. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts?
Towards Measuring Statement Coherence
via Spatial Analysis
Vision Paper
Krzysztof Janowicz Grant McKenzie
STKO Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Center for Geospatial Information Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
November 2017
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

2. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
The Problem
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
‘The amount of energy
needed to refute bullshit is
an order of magnitude bigger
than to produce it’ (Brandolini, 2013)
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

3. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
Semantics
Semantics ;-)
Terminology
Fake news is a type of propaganda or ‘journalism’ that consists of
deliberate misinformation, e.g., for political goals or as online clickbait to
generate revenues. Not new, e.g., Amerigo Vespucci’s first voyage is
likely fake as are several other voyages of famous explorers.
An alternative fact is a statements posited as an alternative to another,
often more widely accepted statements about some situation.
Bullshit are expressions intended to persuade without regard for truth.
(Harry G. Frankfurt (2005): ‘On Bullshit’.)
Why does this matter?
Early results show that fake news (and bullshit) may be detectable
using NLP techniques such as topic modeling as it is possible to
construct a labeled corpus.
Alternative facts are individual statements such as “420k people rode
the DC Metro on 1/20/2017". Only in some cases they can be directly
checked against knowledge graphs to determine whether they are true.
See also: William Wang (2017): ‘Liar, Liar Pants on Fire: A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection’.
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

4. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
Semantics
Truth is Tricky
Truth itself is a more difficult concept than one would naively assume.
There are many different and often incompatible theories of truth.
Coherence theory
Mandates that truth is a property of systems of propositions and
can only be applied to individual properties based on their coherence to
the other propositions. Hence, contradictory proposition can be true
as long as they cohere to some system of propositions.
Correspondence theory
Defines individual propositions as being true if they accurately reflect
(or explain) ‘reality’.
Constructivist theory
Consensus theory
...
Important consequence: A statement may be true according to one
theory and false according to another one.
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

5. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
The Vision
The Vision
Reverse the bullshit
asymmetry principle by
making it more expensive to
maintain a coherent set of
alternative facts
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

6. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
Underlying Idea
The Vision
Important Assumption: Most people that fall for alternative
facts may be naive, do not question their echo chamber, are
not used to critical thinking, and so forth, but they would not
question basic statements/facts, e.g., physical laws.
Distributed, Web-scale knowledge graphs such as Linked Data follow the
AAA(AA) principle by which anyone can say anything about any topic (at any
place and at any time).
Linked Data statements in are not facts, they can contradict across different data
hubs. Coherence truth tells us that we can pick any statement as long at it is
coherent with a set of statements that we believe to be true.
Given well-accepted statements from the general knowledge graph and two sets
of contradicting statements (one of them being the alternative facts), can we show
that the alternative facts set of statements is incoherent as long as one does not
add more alternative facts to it?
Can we use spatial analysis (in the broadest sense) to do so?
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

7. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
Spatial Analysis and Geographic Principles
A Crazy Idea?
Goodchild and Li (2012) studied the imagined country of Allestone drawn
by child prodigy Thomas Williams Malkin by measuring whether it was
adhering to three well-known geographic principles:
Fractal dimension of the imaginary coastline
Horton’s Law on the bifurcation ratios of streams
Central Place Theory
Interestingly, the map of Allestone was coherent with our knowledge of
geography despite being imagined.
However, one can use other data and spatial analysis to expose
Allestone. In fact, the recent story of two women lost at sea for months is
now being questioned via NOAA storm data and the ship’s trajectory.
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

8. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
A Worked Example
Crowd Density: A Real Example
Basic statements about (point)
density, areas, and so forth are
not being questioned
Additional statements(*) are
introduced to keep the
alternative crowd size ‘fact’
coherent with basic statements
believed to be true
Can we push the person to
introduce even more additional
statements in order to maintain
her theory?
(*)
To the best of our knowledge, the 2017 picture was
taken about 30min earlier; which is insignificant.
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

9. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
A Worked Example
Spatial Analysis: Density, Transportation, Isochrones, Clustering,...
Can we compute proxy statements via spatial analysis that (when added to the
set of basic statements) would be coherent to the factual statements but would
need additional statements to become coherent with the alternative facts?
Sources: (Top) Keith Still, Professor of Crowd Science via NY Times; (left) Wikipedia; (right) Strava
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

10. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
A Worked Example
Crowd Density: A Real Example (Continued)
Given that one would commonly accept that a larger crowd size would lead to
more metro riders, less people would cause less congestion and thus Strava users,
e.g., bikers, may show up earlier/ride faster, more/less Ubers would be ordered...
Potential new statements to be introduced to the alternative facts
micro-theory to keep it consistent with common beliefs (that are not
questioned, see example before):
Supporters in 2017 are from a population that less frequently uses the
metro and Uber
Less people visited/biked through the National Mall because it was
colder than in 2009
Less people checked-in at restaurants and hotels because they came
from neighboring states
...
Fine! But the need to make up all these additional statements reverses
the bullshit asymmetry principle and this is all we really wanted.
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

11. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
Summary and Future Work
Does it Scale?
Spatial analysis can be used for fact-checking and to reverse the
asymmetry principle
‘We need to fight rumours and conspiracy with engaging and powerful
narratives that leverage the same techniques as dis-information’ [DGI(2017)09]
GIS, e.g., via Esri’s Story Maps, allow us to develop such narratives based
on real data and analysis. Dry fact-checking alone will not work.
Will people care? Maybe, if we give them intuitive tools to check ‘facts’
against their common knowledge such as why there were less metro riders.
If we manually perform spatial analysis for every alternative fact, we have not
gained anything. Can we scale/automate the process?
This is an open question, but likely we can learn which GI methods address
which kinds of statements, e.g., density-based, from GIS usage patterns.
Many potential measures for how “alternative" a ‘fact‘ is, e.g., entropy,
number of triggered changes (entailment) in a knowledge graph, and so forth.
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie

12. The Problem The Vision Beyond ‘Vision’
Summary and Future Work
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts?
Towards Measuring Statement Coherence
via Spatial Analysis
Vision Paper
Krzysztof Janowicz Grant McKenzie
STKO Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Center for Geospatial Information Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
November 2017
How “Alternative" are Alternative Facts? Janowicz and McKenzie