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It doesn't have to be. We don't have to accept manually reading through news articles and spending precious time digesting that information and connecting all o

It doesn't have to be. We don't have to accept manually reading through news articles and spending precious time digesting that information and connecting all of the dots in our flawed heads with our flawed memory. We need tools for information digestion and management to cast more informed votes. Unless we just want to admit that voters can't keep up with their government and hold it accountable, in which case we need tools to manage a government that cannot manage its own information input/output. Critical thinking is nice and the most basic requirement, but it doesn't enlighten you to facts that you simply don't have time to discover. You can make educated guesses and you could be right, but they are still guesses. To go and find all of those facts, you have to spend an enormous amount of time reading all sources of information (Breitbart, MSM, alt-right, ADL, etc.) or you have to admit you are making decisions with incomplete information. You also have to watch videos, listen to sound bites, and read tweets. Time is the real enemy and the reason so many people give up in the face of this information-saturated reality is that no one has enough of it to continue using their eyes and ears to parse the world's raw data. Anything that reduces the time cost of being an informed voter is going to have the greatest impact of managing information and governments.

pault 10y ago
The problem is, reading all sources of journalism and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative does not necessarily get you to the truth.
- FLUX-YOU 10y ago
  It's something to be taken into account, but no, the tools will probably not be a "truth meter". But for every 10 articles the media pumps out, maybe I only have to read 1 article. This is always going to be lossy, but it obviously should be less lossy than a human. I think that it will be easier to make tools to manage and summarize accurately than to limit the rate of growth or output of information.
intended 10y ago
This was the old problem. It was solved by having groups of experts and journalists. This wasn't popular because one group of people kept Having their feelings and biases attacked. They were later served by the media empires built to serve their views. They got their experts and their talking heads to say things they felt needed to be said. In so doing the first false dichotomy was established - feelings and opinions are the same no matter the facts and the experts disagree. So the first layer of agreement/expert concord was breached. This results in the problem you describe. What we face now is fiction being camouflaged as news sites, and super insulation/echo chambers. This is happening at the margins. Topics and people which are capable of being attacked in this manner. Later the surface are of attack will increase as technology, technique improve while human fatigue sets in.

pault 10y ago

The problem is, reading all sources of journalism and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative does not necessarily get you to the truth.

FLUX-YOU 10y ago
It's something to be taken into account, but no, the tools will probably not be a "truth meter". But for every 10 articles the media pumps out, maybe I only have to read 1 article. This is always going to be lossy, but it obviously should be less lossy than a human. I think that it will be easier to make tools to manage and summarize accurately than to limit the rate of growth or output of information.

intended 10y ago

This was the old problem. It was solved by having groups of experts and journalists. This wasn't popular because one group of people kept Having their feelings and biases attacked. They were later served by the media empires built to serve their views. They got their experts and their talking heads to say things they felt needed to be said. In so doing the first false dichotomy was established - feelings and opinions are the same no matter the facts and the experts disagree. So the first layer of agreement/expert concord was breached. This results in the problem you describe. What we face now is fiction being camouflaged as news sites, and super insulation/echo chambers. This is happening at the margins. Topics and people which are capable of being attacked in this manner. Later the surface are of attack will increase as technology, technique improve while human fatigue sets in.