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It's not a hard question, it's an easy one - We can't fix it. If you want accurate news you have to think, you have to be willing to know a site's history, who

It's not a hard question, it's an easy one - We can't fix it. If you want accurate news you have to think, you have to be willing to know a site's history, who pays for it, what their usual bias is, how they compare with scientific research papers and compare with other news sources to see who's reporting. You have to do that foot work, if you can't do it, you'll never get accurate news. Once you know a few news sources that are generally trustworthy this gets a lot easier of course, with some exceptions. You only really have to do this once per source to get a basic feeling. We can't just go out and do that for people either without introducing similar biases. It has to be done by every individual who wants an accurate depiction of the truth. Call it idealistic, but anything less is unacceptable in one way or another, so it's the way it has to be. At best we could build vetting tools into social networks or perhaps better as browser extensions to allow you to filter and see general details about sources, it might be difficult to not introduce issues into these sorts of tools though. Voting systems and public commenting offer a decent alternative in many ways, but often produce one set of biases that dominate completely. They're no replacement for proper research.

captain_crabs 10y ago
Ah, I see your point about outsourced thinking. If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of sources, I wager you'd end up with a largely consistent set of questions being asked, and relatively "factual"(from the pov of an average American) group of answers (who owns them, how was this article paid for, etc). Through this, you could make whatever bias exists in a piece really explicit (loosely defined as relations & incentives). So the "vetting" toolsets that make this easy and available are what make consuming news more humane. I think the "ministry of truth" thought is valid, because an organization started off of good will and good intent might be that way for a while, but after it is cemented in and the people who run it filter out, the power structure it leaves is ripe for abuse. But this is what the hard question is: how might we tackle this, beyond just telling people to think better? If you had to create a new "article" primitive, meaning, you had to have these things to be considered an article, what would you put in it to aid explicit bias and relieve the burden on informed thinkers? (Title, Author, Contents, ...)

captain_crabs 10y ago

Ah, I see your point about outsourced thinking. If you take a bunch of informed, critical thinkers who do their research and point them at the same group of sources, I wager you'd end up with a largely consistent set of questions being asked, and relatively "factual"(from the pov of an average American) group of answers (who owns them, how was this article paid for, etc). Through this, you could make whatever bias exists in a piece really explicit (loosely defined as relations & incentives). So the "vetting" toolsets that make this easy and available are what make consuming news more humane. I think the "ministry of truth" thought is valid, because an organization started off of good will and good intent might be that way for a while, but after it is cemented in and the people who run it filter out, the power structure it leaves is ripe for abuse. But this is what the hard question is: how might we tackle this, beyond just telling people to think better? If you had to create a new "article" primitive, meaning, you had to have these things to be considered an article, what would you put in it to aid explicit bias and relieve the burden on informed thinkers? (Title, Author, Contents, ...)