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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 easie

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.

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.