3 ms·

Do we have actual reason to believe that really high adoption rates of people using their own judgement actually is a good thing? I think there is inherent nee

Do we have actual reason to believe that really high adoption rates of people using their own judgement actually is a good thing? I think there is inherent need for specialization to occur on digesting information and drawing conclusions from it. And when someone is good at it, we should want them to leverage other people parroting what they say to help signal boost

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I just don't buy it. Are there any of your beliefs which you'd want to abandon just because someone got on TV and told you they're wrong?
- MiracleUser 7y ago
  the focus is more that I dont have the time or energy to form personal beliefs on everything talked about on TV (or by news authorities in general). It's easier to adopt someone else's beliefs and entertain that position than talk out of my ass or not be able to talk at all. If that belief is successfully challenged, I change it. It is also easier to change my belief on something if I did not form it myself. Most people lack strong beliefs on most things. news authorities exist because people are looking for them to help fill that gap and relieve the responsibility of forming beliefs on all the things relevant to the community each person is a part of
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    That’s fair. I didn’t interpret the original comment that way, but I wouldn’t agree with the strong position that there literally shouldn’t be such a thing as an authoritative source of news.
    - MiracleUser 7y ago
      Ah yeah, I did not want to rule out the possibility that people in general may be shit at forming their own opinions even when they do spend the time and energy. But that also opens the rabbit hole into why that would be the case (low vs high intelligence - but intelligence is hard to generalize), and variance of judgement based on context (e.g. quality soccer judgement vs shit hockey judgement for same person). All of which kind of comes back to quantitative changes to either time or energy needed for each person to get to an acceptable judgement (even if it's infinite of both for some people-topic pairs), and both of those resources are incredibly finite compared to the volume of topics that are beneficial to the community to have beliefs on. The big point I want to drive home here, which I have a feeling we agree on, is that we should prioritize the topics people are forming their beliefs on more than what those beliefs are. This is something authoritative figures actually can help with (for better or worse) due to the centralization. So imo, maybe you disagree here, it is not enough to simply allow authoritative sources to exist but we should be more actively promoting sources as authorities for topics.
protonfish 7y ago
But you would still require the skill to judge who is and is not a legitimate authority. This sounds more difficult and easily gamed than not bothering with a middle man and judging the facts yourself. Even if there is some perfect way of distinguishing true authorities from frauds, nobody is so authoritative as to never make a mistake, or so clueless as to not occasionally stumble into a correct answer.
- MiracleUser 7y ago
  You are only thinking about a single belief on a single topic, but we are tasked with a near endless amount of potentially important things to form beliefs on and an incredible sum of time and energy needed to actually do that yourself. Authorities would be open to judgement by communities. You can better leverage your trust in people to cut down on the amount of energy and time you need to spend to get to a reasonable opinion. There becomes less instances for common miscommunication to go unnoticed. Yes, this comes with a risk of being gamed, which is another interesting conversation, but that's more a human vs human topic than a humans vs reality topic. which is important (economic incentives destroying the world and all) but a bit off-topic from the more general point I am making basically, looking at all the details yourself is only good if you know what you are looking at and have the time to do so for everything you need beliefs on. The value that authorities provide is in consolidating multiple beliefs into a feed. Secondary to that is getting those beliefs to be high quality. Even if you go do the research yourself for a more quality belief to "fact-check" what you just heard - you have still accepted the value of the authority to tell you the TOPIC on which you should be forming a belief. All you did was locally iterate their work on a single topic to improve the deliverable. Context matters as well. I dont need to judge the facts myself to figure out how many people died in the california fires if that detail is included in the report from authority. I'm okay with an authority figure telling me that number. Maybe I could arrive at a more accurate number myself, sure - but to what extent does the accuracy matter? It certainly matters if I believe no one died, or if I believe the death toll was orders of magnitude higher than it was. The only real issue with trusting authority figures is the recursion. Authority figures using their own authority figures.. resulting in an appearance of multiple independent sources arriving at the same conclusion when in reality it is all signal boosting of a single source. To protect yourself, the simple thing to do is assume any people who say the same thing heard it from the same place until you're given reason to believe otherwise

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I just don't buy it. Are there any of your beliefs which you'd want to abandon just because someone got on TV and told you they're wrong?

MiracleUser 7y ago
the focus is more that I dont have the time or energy to form personal beliefs on everything talked about on TV (or by news authorities in general). It's easier to adopt someone else's beliefs and entertain that position than talk out of my ass or not be able to talk at all. If that belief is successfully challenged, I change it. It is also easier to change my belief on something if I did not form it myself. Most people lack strong beliefs on most things. news authorities exist because people are looking for them to help fill that gap and relieve the responsibility of forming beliefs on all the things relevant to the community each person is a part of
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  That’s fair. I didn’t interpret the original comment that way, but I wouldn’t agree with the strong position that there literally shouldn’t be such a thing as an authoritative source of news.
  - MiracleUser 7y ago
    Ah yeah, I did not want to rule out the possibility that people in general may be shit at forming their own opinions even when they do spend the time and energy. But that also opens the rabbit hole into why that would be the case (low vs high intelligence - but intelligence is hard to generalize), and variance of judgement based on context (e.g. quality soccer judgement vs shit hockey judgement for same person). All of which kind of comes back to quantitative changes to either time or energy needed for each person to get to an acceptable judgement (even if it's infinite of both for some people-topic pairs), and both of those resources are incredibly finite compared to the volume of topics that are beneficial to the community to have beliefs on. The big point I want to drive home here, which I have a feeling we agree on, is that we should prioritize the topics people are forming their beliefs on more than what those beliefs are. This is something authoritative figures actually can help with (for better or worse) due to the centralization. So imo, maybe you disagree here, it is not enough to simply allow authoritative sources to exist but we should be more actively promoting sources as authorities for topics.

protonfish 7y ago

But you would still require the skill to judge who is and is not a legitimate authority. This sounds more difficult and easily gamed than not bothering with a middle man and judging the facts yourself. Even if there is some perfect way of distinguishing true authorities from frauds, nobody is so authoritative as to never make a mistake, or so clueless as to not occasionally stumble into a correct answer.

MiracleUser 7y ago
You are only thinking about a single belief on a single topic, but we are tasked with a near endless amount of potentially important things to form beliefs on and an incredible sum of time and energy needed to actually do that yourself. Authorities would be open to judgement by communities. You can better leverage your trust in people to cut down on the amount of energy and time you need to spend to get to a reasonable opinion. There becomes less instances for common miscommunication to go unnoticed. Yes, this comes with a risk of being gamed, which is another interesting conversation, but that's more a human vs human topic than a humans vs reality topic. which is important (economic incentives destroying the world and all) but a bit off-topic from the more general point I am making basically, looking at all the details yourself is only good if you know what you are looking at and have the time to do so for everything you need beliefs on. The value that authorities provide is in consolidating multiple beliefs into a feed. Secondary to that is getting those beliefs to be high quality. Even if you go do the research yourself for a more quality belief to "fact-check" what you just heard - you have still accepted the value of the authority to tell you the TOPIC on which you should be forming a belief. All you did was locally iterate their work on a single topic to improve the deliverable. Context matters as well. I dont need to judge the facts myself to figure out how many people died in the california fires if that detail is included in the report from authority. I'm okay with an authority figure telling me that number. Maybe I could arrive at a more accurate number myself, sure - but to what extent does the accuracy matter? It certainly matters if I believe no one died, or if I believe the death toll was orders of magnitude higher than it was. The only real issue with trusting authority figures is the recursion. Authority figures using their own authority figures.. resulting in an appearance of multiple independent sources arriving at the same conclusion when in reality it is all signal boosting of a single source. To protect yourself, the simple thing to do is assume any people who say the same thing heard it from the same place until you're given reason to believe otherwise