8 ms·

When people find out who said a particular thing, the “what” seems to fall by the wayside and the “who” seems to matter more. The statement is accepted or reje

When people find out who said a particular thing, the “what” seems to fall by the wayside and the “who” seems to matter more. The statement is accepted or rejected outright because of the person. Maybe it is time to change that. For instance, imagine a world where every bit of text you encounter — every news story, every tweet, every statement, every message — had no attributions AT ALL. Meaning, you have no idea if something was written by a celebrity, a politician with a (D) or an (R), your best friend, or your worst enemy. At that point, quite a bit of bias should start to filter out! Or, there could be a middle ground, a kind of “anonymous key” to recognize statements by the same person. Say you read a story last month, and “agreed” with that person; this month, maybe there is a way to find out if something else you read is from the same person but NOT a way to see exactly who that is. Then, you can start to build a sense of trust in sources but are still not able to be influenced by other factors.

wvenable 10y ago
I'm not sure it matters. The real phenomenon of fake news (made up news to gather clicks) would be useless if people cared about the "who". It seems the case presented in the article, that people place more value on content that supports their world view, appears to work regardless of the source.
coding123 10y ago
I loved this thought experiment. I often feel like this too, a lot of people identify with R or D or Trump or Clinton, not because of any specific policies they wrote. It's almost always your community, basically what level of shunning am I going to receive for believing X. We're all tiny machine learning experiments that push our personal agendas. We align with an issue that's important to us or we align with a group that's important to us. People are very "group oriented" so specific issues, while important, are typically less meaningful than the tribe mentality.

wvenable 10y ago

I'm not sure it matters. The real phenomenon of fake news (made up news to gather clicks) would be useless if people cared about the "who". It seems the case presented in the article, that people place more value on content that supports their world view, appears to work regardless of the source.

coding123 10y ago

I loved this thought experiment. I often feel like this too, a lot of people identify with R or D or Trump or Clinton, not because of any specific policies they wrote. It's almost always your community, basically what level of shunning am I going to receive for believing X. We're all tiny machine learning experiments that push our personal agendas. We align with an issue that's important to us or we align with a group that's important to us. People are very "group oriented" so specific issues, while important, are typically less meaningful than the tribe mentality.