Very little of the scrutiny is any good at all. It's riddled with mood affiliation and confirmation bias. The incentives simply are not with thoughtful, conside

Very little of the scrutiny is any good at all. It's riddled with mood affiliation and confirmation bias. The incentives simply are not with thoughtful, considered analysis. It's too easy to create moments for people to be swept up in, and to use the tools of persuasion to raise the persuader's stock. Where social media could be an agent for reason, it had not taken that role very much so far. Take the stories around Ferguson - I think Alex Tabbarok won the internet the day he released "Ferguson and the Modern Debtor's Prison" but that point of view only appears in other references to the situation sparingly if at all. I just have to flatly disagree with the idea that better information leads to higher confidence in conclusions - there's simply no way that can be true unless the subject is inherently trivial or unless some methodological advance has made the previously intractable tractable. More information means more uncertainty unless you're dealing in convergent statistical situations. What's needed overall is for more people to listen with respect and genuine curiosity to people with whom they disagree. The effect of social media so far has been decidedly uncomfortable, especially in the Middle East. Perhaps that is the Islamic Protestant Reformation, with social media playing the role of printing press, but I doubt it - people who know Islam much better than I claim it's actually riddled with deep apostasy and not the kind that seems overall a positive thing. Ignoring deeply normative Koranic instructions for the application of Islam in favor of violence ( perhaps even war-crime-shaped violence ) cannot be a good thing.