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I see things almost completely opposite to you. Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. You would get things from your local newspaper,

I see things almost completely opposite to you. Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. You would get things from your local newspaper, or tv networks. Professionals would work and filter what we see. Today anyone can fire up a blog, twitter, youtube, and start talking about anything. People today thus have been getting exposed to all kinds of ideas, and being taken in by them: the earth is flat, the election was stolen, etc, and believing it. I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.

andromeduck 6y ago
We had more diverse access but less diverse consumption.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.
- 8note 6y ago
  Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match. Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in
  - coryfklein 6y ago
    Education has changed. Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured. This is not the case today, where merely speaking disagreement to the majority narrative gets your professorship cancelled and gets students disciplined.
    - georgebcrawford 6y ago
      I see this repeated constantly - how many cases have there been? I'm asking genuinely.
      - coryfklein 6y ago
        Funny you should ask, because I just happened to see Robin Hanson share [0] the exact statistics on this today. 2020: 64 2019: 11 2018: 13 2017: 9 2016: 4 2015: 4 [0] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211 https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211
        tfehring 6y ago
        Just glancing at the linked spreadsheet, I see way more than 4 events in 2020 for which termination is pretty clearly justified and necessary, so this trend seems to be driven at least in part by a change in behavior by professors and not just others' responses to that behavior. Also worth mentioning that the majority of the listed professors don't seem to have actually been fired or even disciplined - unsuccessful petitions and the like are included.
        joe5150 6y ago
        it's also the case that some groups have become hyper-vigilant about academic "cancellations" in the last several years, which could account for why so many purported incidents have occurred since more attention is being paid to the issue. I don't see any evidence that this spreadsheet is the result of someone systematically reviewing every case of a professor or other academic being dismissed, rebuked or whatever since 2014, so I don't really see how it could constitute a trend.
- xnx 6y ago
  I agree that education has changed for the worse in many ways, but might disagree with you on some of the specifics. Being direct, I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc. One of my hobbies puts me among people who pretty homogeneously lean right. They say more or less the exact same thing about the left and on the same list of topics no less. I can paraphrase talking points if you would like. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in beliefs between the left and the right when it comes to the what is right and what is wrong. I think if you expanded your list of issues slightly you would be very hard pressed to find someone who is not a hardcore partisan from either party that does not believe that the "other party" has it right on at least one or two issues.
  - aksss 6y ago
    I think this exposes some of the problem we're discussing though. Your view that one party is anti-evidence, anti-facts, anti-science betrays enormous bias or at least indicates that your information stream is very biased. There are plenty of examples of policy proposals from either party that can be described this way. Facts and evidence are conveniently ignored in the furtherance of policy, routinely. To say that this party or that party is _mostly_ unlike the other in this respect is itself "anti-evidence" or contrary to the objective evidence.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      For example?
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Yes, arguably because certain political elements have made it their business to make damned sure those organs fail. When educated people consistently vote for one party over the other, it's absurd to expect the losing party to support improvements to education. You'd have to be, well, poorly educated to think that. And we all know who loves the poorly educated...
- hnick 6y ago
  What happened since the 60s in your opinion? If I were to guess, it seems pubic policy in recent decades has often been founded on shaky ground. Anti-communism, anti-drug policy, various health/welfare policies, and so on are often not particularly evidence based. I can see this leading to a broader acceptance of dual-reality "facts" like we're seeing now. Words and truth lose meaning. But is that new? I have no idea.
nostromo 6y ago
"because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism. Democracy is built on trusting the populace to self govern. Saying that the populace is too dumb or uninformed to be trusted to self govern is inherently anti-democratic.
- slg 6y ago
  We are a representative republic. Part of that reason is because it is too burdensome to expect the general public to have the information and expertise to be fully involved in governance. We delegate that responsibility to our representatives. EDIT: I removed a line that was superfluous to my point and was drawing attention away from my actual point.
  - welterde 6y ago
    This gets repeated again and again, but is just wrong. The USA is both a representative democracy and a republic - the same as most other democracies on this planet. Republic just means that the government is a public affair - there is no monarch. It's the opposite of a monarchy.
    - slg 6y ago
      You are missing the point of my comment. The main focus is not the distinction between democracy and republic. It was that we do not govern ourselves directly. We elect people to do that for us because most of us aren't equipped to do it ourselves. The comment I was replying to called that fascism. I removed the "We are not a democracy." line in my previous comment to refocus it on what I was really trying to say.
  - yrimaxi 6y ago
    These kind of comments always get downvoted but it is pretty accurate. Certainly people like Madison didn’t want a thriving, egalitarian, democratic, civic culture and nation.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I think you are wrong. While the cost of authoring and distributing content are cheaper than ever and anyone can broadcast to the planet trivially, the ability to actually bring attention to your content has never been more scarce. It is deeply controlled and manipulated by huge confirmation-bias-as-service platforms in every recommender system, personalized ad system, and content feed across the mainstream internet. Your fellow citizens deserve more credit. They have brains. They really can and almost always do form adequate understanding of reasonable takes on new information. But when their eyeballs are subjected to consumerist bidding wars and ranking algorithms to inflame, to stoke fear and insecurity, to render feelings of inadequacy, and they are so thoroughly manipulated, then you get information monoculture. We need information diversity and information vitamins. Instead we’re allowing ourselves to be spoonfed information junk food.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I don't think that's true either. Before, bringing attention to your content required first getting the attention of some huge media organization, then piggybacking off. At the end of the day there's still only as much attention as there are people attending, but the barriers to entry are far lower today. Meanwhile, our fellow citizens deserve no credit at all, and neither do we. No one has any real idea what's going on, we just either follow the herd or totally gamble. Even if someone was actually able to be correct about complex systems, it would be unverifiable.
bduerst 6y ago
Agreed. With every new communication medium comes new responsibility. When radio was first introduced, it was rife with misinformation and false advertising. One Dr. Brinkly made a fortune selling fake goat testicle transplants (for treating ED) over the radio, only to relocate it to the Mexican border when he was shut down. He made so much money that he ran for Governor and received 30% of the vote. We're kind of in the same place right now, but with a much broader medium. How we move forward is anyone's guess.
jrockway 6y ago
A diverse information diet is a great thing, but you need the context and tools for understanding what you read. That means you need to understand math, science, history, social science, etc. at a somewhat advanced level to make sense of these things. America has been good at free speech, and we should never give that up. But for free speech to result in advancement of society, rather than goons storming the Capitol, a good education is an absolute requirement, and the government has not given all Americans the opportunity to get a good education. There will be pressure to censor speech because people aren't equipped to process it -- we should resist that and focus on education instead. This is where we should be spending our money; this is what the government exists to do. Give everyone an equal standing to understand these sources of information. We're not doing that, and the results are bad.
- milkytron 6y ago
  Education is the root of the solution for all problems. It should always be one of the top priorities for any populace.
  - xnx 6y ago
    An educated populace is also the most dangerous thing to anyone in power (politicians, business operators, etc.). Even without being a coordinated conspiracy, that is a constant force working against improved education.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      You don't even have to postulate education being dangerous to people in power (something that I personally find to be more conspiracy than not). It's enough to notice that there's near zero economic incentives for providing actual education. The market settled on an equilibrium of baseline operational knowledge + filtering through standardized testing, and then advanced operational knowledge acquired through voluntary higher education and on the job. And it continued to optimize accordingly. The only thing that makes people try to teach beyond this minimum is humanistic values, belief in importance of education. Against it works the entire economy, forcing individual teachers and schools alike to find savings, "cut out fat", make lean. Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide (because it's not just an US phenomenon; we start to see the same problems over here in Europe).
bhntr3 6y ago
Yes. We had free speech but we weren't prepared for unedited, viral free speech. We weren't prepared for cameras in every ordinary person's hands. We also weren't prepared for our free speech to be archived and searchable forever. I think it's easy to blame the symptoms of social media for the issues we have. But the internet, video quality bandwidth, smartphones, and social media together have combined to dramatically change who publishes and who finds it over the last 10-15 years. In my mind, it is going to take us time to adapt, maybe a couple generations. Things will be difficult during that time but I hope we don't make regressive changes in our values based on what is fundamentally (in my opinion) an issue adapting our approach to free speech to the rapid advancement of publishing technology. EDIT: "most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" -> This is the kind of dramatic conclusion I don't think we should be drawing.
NortySpock 6y ago
And back in the 1500s anyone could build a printer and rags for paper and crank out hundreds of broadsheets or pamphlets to be distributed all over town. Which lead to pulp fiction, the open exchange of ideas and the religious wars of the 1500s and onwards. Open exchange of ideas is not new. It's just faster and cheaper now.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Think about what you're saying. Almost no one could actually do that. You had to be quite wealthy and incredibly well educated.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    The point is that it was a step function. The bar suddenly dropped a huge amount. It went from "mostly just the church can produce written works" to "anyone who can afford the people to run a printing press can produce written works". It was a massive shock to the system.
closeparen 6y ago
The stolen election claim is put forward by the President of the United States, not some random people with blogs.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  The president's own information diet is often fueled from said blogs though. These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official, so where do you think he got them from? He regularly retweets and repeats talking points created in the deepest parts of the internet.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official Do you have a source for this comment? I'm pretty sure he heard about the allegations of fraud from actual purported witnesses who filed sworn affidavits. Those blogs that you're saying he gets the information from have hyperlinks to the documents filed by his legal team. I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      > witnesses who filed sworn affidavits Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper. If intelligence services or elections officials had found something, they would've announced it officially, instead they have announced the opposite. [0] [1] > I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around. Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet. [2] (and hundreds more) [0] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio... [1] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-la-ballots-idUSKBN27M236 https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-la-ballots-idUS...
anfilt 6y ago
What? “Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.” Do you realize how elitist and even authoritarian that statement is.
- baq 6y ago
  Does elitist and authoritarian imply false? Being reasonable is time consuming, expensive, requires constant education and a mind open to accepting that being wrong is ok. It’s elitist almost by definition. I don’t see how you got authoritarian in the equation, though.
  - anfilt 6y ago
    The very notion of putting people in the category of sophisticated and unsophisticated, is a form of classism. It gets into the realm of authoritarianism when we start wanting people to be making decisions for others based on this. This not something we should be doing in a free society.
    - Jochim 6y ago
      I don't think it's classist to acknowledge that a lot of people do not have the privilege or time to thoroughly investigate the accuracy and biases of the information they are receiving. The response to this should be to ensure everyone does have the education and free time to be able to deal with this type of misinformation, but that runs contrary to the goals of those who benefit from the status quo.
    - phobosanomaly 6y ago
      Not if it is accompanied with a simultaneous desire offer the populace the tools to become more savvy at understanding the world around them with an education in history, politics, economics, ethics, science, etc.
notJim 6y ago
I agree with the first paragraph, but strongly disagree with the second. Those regimes that filtered information very narrowly constrained ideas to align with the status quo. That was sometimes good, but often held back people with minority views from finding and organizing with each other. Progressive social movements and positive new possibilities have come out of this, in addition to reactionary ones. What we do have to do is figure out how to have a shared view of the world that is less authoritarian than in the past. People now try to get the private platforms to enforce particular viewpoints through deplatforming and such. I am sympathetic to this as a practical matter, but don't think it is a viable long-term solution, as it will just lead us back to where we were, except with different people calling the shots.
jchrisa 6y ago
It's not that people are unable to understand, it's that understanding isn't part of the game. It's about group membership and a lot of that is about knowing the "phrases" that make you seem like a member. Easy bad ideas make for catchy phrases. The kinds of thoughts that are spreading across the US today would have been stopped by editorial accountability in an earlier era. I'm not sure education is the way to reduce the impact of easy bad ideas, because group members take on the catch phrases without thinking them through.
crazydoggers 6y ago
This is supposed to be why we have a republic rather than a radicle democracy. People forget, statistically half the population has an IQ below 100. And importantly, to be absolutely clear, that does not mean those people should not have a voice, or that they are “stupid”, far from it. It does however mean that certain issues are overwhelming complex to assume every American can make competent decisions on. Many of these rioters I’m sure don’t grasp how the very system they are protesting works on a fundamental level. If they believe the earth is flat, how can we expect them to understand the electoral college process, or the role of state versus federal government in our election process. Certainly everyone’s voices need to be heard. When people and their families are struggling, many of them doing the jobs that make this country function, they are ignored. So when a savior seems to come before them, we need to be very vigilant. We’ve seen these things happen before in history with other demagogues. We expect in this country that all voices should be heard in order to elect people who’s job it is to lead. That’s the definition of a republic. That leadership should have killed the conspiracies and falsehoods from the start, protecting those of the democracy who are vulnerable, many of them suffering from the consequences of this pandemic. Instead they sat on their hands. We need to hold our leaders responsible. We need to ask, en masse, for those leaders to hold each other accountable. We also need to take ownership as a people. Us. We consume this media. We have created these social media companies, and allowed them to spread this stuff. Ultimately each and every one of us is responsible. Let’s make sure going forward we ask more for those we ask to lead in our stead. Our vote isn’t the only thing we have to do that. We also have our voice and our 1st amendment. Let’s use it to the fullest.
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable. Sophisticated people are just as prone to bias and cognitive error as unsophisticated people. The danger with limiting the spread of information is that the task of deciding what to censor is vulnerable to corruption by the interests of the censor.
bg24 6y ago
Yes. And a large chunk of population simply aligns based on emotion and do not have the desire to learn. This applies to all categories of people, including myself.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Half of the population has a below-average IQ. Maybe 10% of those with an above average IQ are Dark Triad personalities somewhere on the toxic spectrum between narcissism and sociopathy. Economic values operate to reward them, and to punish - or at least inconvenience - those with less toxic values. So naturally the Dark Triad types have a very strong incentive to exploit the below-average. And the more below average and cognitively unsophisticated they are, the easier it is to exploit them. This isn't even about Left vs Right. It's about how you design a political and economic system that can handle these challenges without imploding.
atlgator 6y ago
It isn’t about information diversity. Diversity is sought to counteract the real problem, which is that news isn’t news. It’s entertainment. Journalism no longer presents fact. They present an interpretation of facts, ostensibly spun and sensationalized toward the ideology of their viewers. 30 years ago this didn’t happen. You could watch any of the nightly news shows and walk away more or less with the same understanding of current affairs. That’s not true anymore. Why did this happen? Because infotainment generates more viewers and therefore more ad revenue. It’s also a means for politicians to galvanize the electorate and stir up hysteria to their benefit.
rootsudo 6y ago
People back then could print anything. We have more population of people in the country, more then ever - and more outlets but it does not change how information is disseminated - from Thomas Paine Common Sense, to getting all the farmers with pitchfolks to revolt over whiskey tax to the newspaper boy shouting on the corner. It's really the same coin.
rayiner 6y ago
A lot of this stuff comes via talk radio, not twitter or YouTube, and that's not exactly new technology. I think you're confusing cause and effect. The problem is that people don't trust the same "professionals" to "filter" their news. People trusted Cronkite. There wasn't a huge market for "here's the news Cronkite won't tell you." Even when the country got super divided during Vietnam. Now, I don't know why people have lost faith in professionals. I have my theory, which is that there has been a really significant ideological divergence between the professional class and ordinary people. Let me give you an example. I don't want to litigate the specific example, but I'm just using it to illustrate. I read a lot of Matt Yglesias. He's very smart. But as far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in culture. Like, he doesn't believe it exists. He doesn't understand why people are attached to theirs. So when he talks about immigration, he draws these dichotomies "well there is the economic aspect of the immigration debate, then the xenophobia aspect." I come from a country where a bunch of brown Muslims declared independence from other brown Muslims over the particular Indo-Aryan language they spoke. Bangladeshis would flip out if, for example, a quarter of the country was suddenly Pakistani. Not because they dislike Pakistanis. (I.e. Xenophobia.) But they are very attached to their own culture and don't want anyone to come and change it. One of the most powerful forces in the world is peoples' attachment to soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs, etc. Yglesias boils all of that down to "xenophobia." Now, I'm quite the opposite. I get sad I'm going to die 10,000 miles away from where my ancestors are buried. I'm a bit jealous that my wife's family all lives within 2 hours of where they came over to Oregon on the wagon trains 170 years ago, while mine is scattered around the world in a diaspora. So when I listen to Yglesias, I cringe at some of his takes. I trust him because I've read a lot of his work, but I don't think he understands me or people like me. I can just imagine someone who don't want to put in the effort tuning him out. The professional class is increasingly full of people like Matt Yglesias. Not just "liberal" in terms of supporting this healthcare policy or that one. Or in thinking the Vietnam was was a bad idea. But "liberal" in terms of not sharing a lot of basic premises with ordinary people, like “is it legitimate to be concerned about culture changing in your community.” It’s very hard for people who don’t share those views on basic things like that to talk to each other productively. I think that's a huge part of eroding trust in professionals.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
simonh 6y ago
I think there’s a difference between diverse information being available, and people actually being exposed yo diverse viewpoints. With engagement driven social media more people than ever have a voice, but individuals are also fed a custom tuned diet of only a narrow range of views. If you go looking for different opinions you can find them, but most people don’t do that. They let an algorithm generate their opinions for them by excluding anything that might challenge their views from their feed.
pdonis 6y ago
> Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. Yes. And thirty or forty or fifty years ago (remember the Internet itself is more than 20 years old), we had even less diverse access. However, that does not mean the information we got back then was more reliable than the information we get now. It just means it was harder back then for we the people to spot when we were being misinformed, lied to, or just plain not told about things we should have been told about.
3131s 6y ago
This mindset is terrifying and yet most people here would probably agree with you. We are headed for dark times unless people like you are removed from positions of power.

andromeduck 6y ago

We had more diverse access but less diverse consumption.

brobdingnagians 6y ago

If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.

8note 6y ago
Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match. Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in
- coryfklein 6y ago
  Education has changed. Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured. This is not the case today, where merely speaking disagreement to the majority narrative gets your professorship cancelled and gets students disciplined.
  - georgebcrawford 6y ago
    I see this repeated constantly - how many cases have there been? I'm asking genuinely.
    - coryfklein 6y ago
      Funny you should ask, because I just happened to see Robin Hanson share [0] the exact statistics on this today. 2020: 64 2019: 11 2018: 13 2017: 9 2016: 4 2015: 4 [0] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211 https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211
      - tfehring 6y ago
        Just glancing at the linked spreadsheet, I see way more than 4 events in 2020 for which termination is pretty clearly justified and necessary, so this trend seems to be driven at least in part by a change in behavior by professors and not just others' responses to that behavior. Also worth mentioning that the majority of the listed professors don't seem to have actually been fired or even disciplined - unsuccessful petitions and the like are included.
        joe5150 6y ago
        it's also the case that some groups have become hyper-vigilant about academic "cancellations" in the last several years, which could account for why so many purported incidents have occurred since more attention is being paid to the issue. I don't see any evidence that this spreadsheet is the result of someone systematically reviewing every case of a professor or other academic being dismissed, rebuked or whatever since 2014, so I don't really see how it could constitute a trend.
xnx 6y ago
I agree that education has changed for the worse in many ways, but might disagree with you on some of the specifics. Being direct, I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc. One of my hobbies puts me among people who pretty homogeneously lean right. They say more or less the exact same thing about the left and on the same list of topics no less. I can paraphrase talking points if you would like. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in beliefs between the left and the right when it comes to the what is right and what is wrong. I think if you expanded your list of issues slightly you would be very hard pressed to find someone who is not a hardcore partisan from either party that does not believe that the "other party" has it right on at least one or two issues.
- aksss 6y ago
  I think this exposes some of the problem we're discussing though. Your view that one party is anti-evidence, anti-facts, anti-science betrays enormous bias or at least indicates that your information stream is very biased. There are plenty of examples of policy proposals from either party that can be described this way. Facts and evidence are conveniently ignored in the furtherance of policy, routinely. To say that this party or that party is _mostly_ unlike the other in this respect is itself "anti-evidence" or contrary to the objective evidence.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    For example?
CamperBob2 6y ago
If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Yes, arguably because certain political elements have made it their business to make damned sure those organs fail. When educated people consistently vote for one party over the other, it's absurd to expect the losing party to support improvements to education. You'd have to be, well, poorly educated to think that. And we all know who loves the poorly educated...
hnick 6y ago
What happened since the 60s in your opinion? If I were to guess, it seems pubic policy in recent decades has often been founded on shaky ground. Anti-communism, anti-drug policy, various health/welfare policies, and so on are often not particularly evidence based. I can see this leading to a broader acceptance of dual-reality "facts" like we're seeing now. Words and truth lose meaning. But is that new? I have no idea.

nostromo 6y ago

"because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism. Democracy is built on trusting the populace to self govern. Saying that the populace is too dumb or uninformed to be trusted to self govern is inherently anti-democratic.

slg 6y ago
We are a representative republic. Part of that reason is because it is too burdensome to expect the general public to have the information and expertise to be fully involved in governance. We delegate that responsibility to our representatives. EDIT: I removed a line that was superfluous to my point and was drawing attention away from my actual point.
- welterde 6y ago
  This gets repeated again and again, but is just wrong. The USA is both a representative democracy and a republic - the same as most other democracies on this planet. Republic just means that the government is a public affair - there is no monarch. It's the opposite of a monarchy.
  - slg 6y ago
    You are missing the point of my comment. The main focus is not the distinction between democracy and republic. It was that we do not govern ourselves directly. We elect people to do that for us because most of us aren't equipped to do it ourselves. The comment I was replying to called that fascism. I removed the "We are not a democracy." line in my previous comment to refocus it on what I was really trying to say.
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  These kind of comments always get downvoted but it is pretty accurate. Certainly people like Madison didn’t want a thriving, egalitarian, democratic, civic culture and nation.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I think you are wrong. While the cost of authoring and distributing content are cheaper than ever and anyone can broadcast to the planet trivially, the ability to actually bring attention to your content has never been more scarce. It is deeply controlled and manipulated by huge confirmation-bias-as-service platforms in every recommender system, personalized ad system, and content feed across the mainstream internet. Your fellow citizens deserve more credit. They have brains. They really can and almost always do form adequate understanding of reasonable takes on new information. But when their eyeballs are subjected to consumerist bidding wars and ranking algorithms to inflame, to stoke fear and insecurity, to render feelings of inadequacy, and they are so thoroughly manipulated, then you get information monoculture. We need information diversity and information vitamins. Instead we’re allowing ourselves to be spoonfed information junk food.

ravi-delia 6y ago
I don't think that's true either. Before, bringing attention to your content required first getting the attention of some huge media organization, then piggybacking off. At the end of the day there's still only as much attention as there are people attending, but the barriers to entry are far lower today. Meanwhile, our fellow citizens deserve no credit at all, and neither do we. No one has any real idea what's going on, we just either follow the herd or totally gamble. Even if someone was actually able to be correct about complex systems, it would be unverifiable.

bduerst 6y ago

Agreed. With every new communication medium comes new responsibility. When radio was first introduced, it was rife with misinformation and false advertising. One Dr. Brinkly made a fortune selling fake goat testicle transplants (for treating ED) over the radio, only to relocate it to the Mexican border when he was shut down. He made so much money that he ran for Governor and received 30% of the vote. We're kind of in the same place right now, but with a much broader medium. How we move forward is anyone's guess.

jrockway 6y ago

A diverse information diet is a great thing, but you need the context and tools for understanding what you read. That means you need to understand math, science, history, social science, etc. at a somewhat advanced level to make sense of these things. America has been good at free speech, and we should never give that up. But for free speech to result in advancement of society, rather than goons storming the Capitol, a good education is an absolute requirement, and the government has not given all Americans the opportunity to get a good education. There will be pressure to censor speech because people aren't equipped to process it -- we should resist that and focus on education instead. This is where we should be spending our money; this is what the government exists to do. Give everyone an equal standing to understand these sources of information. We're not doing that, and the results are bad.

milkytron 6y ago
Education is the root of the solution for all problems. It should always be one of the top priorities for any populace.
- xnx 6y ago
  An educated populace is also the most dangerous thing to anyone in power (politicians, business operators, etc.). Even without being a coordinated conspiracy, that is a constant force working against improved education.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    You don't even have to postulate education being dangerous to people in power (something that I personally find to be more conspiracy than not). It's enough to notice that there's near zero economic incentives for providing actual education. The market settled on an equilibrium of baseline operational knowledge + filtering through standardized testing, and then advanced operational knowledge acquired through voluntary higher education and on the job. And it continued to optimize accordingly. The only thing that makes people try to teach beyond this minimum is humanistic values, belief in importance of education. Against it works the entire economy, forcing individual teachers and schools alike to find savings, "cut out fat", make lean. Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide (because it's not just an US phenomenon; we start to see the same problems over here in Europe).

bhntr3 6y ago

Yes. We had free speech but we weren't prepared for unedited, viral free speech. We weren't prepared for cameras in every ordinary person's hands. We also weren't prepared for our free speech to be archived and searchable forever. I think it's easy to blame the symptoms of social media for the issues we have. But the internet, video quality bandwidth, smartphones, and social media together have combined to dramatically change who publishes and who finds it over the last 10-15 years. In my mind, it is going to take us time to adapt, maybe a couple generations. Things will be difficult during that time but I hope we don't make regressive changes in our values based on what is fundamentally (in my opinion) an issue adapting our approach to free speech to the rapid advancement of publishing technology. EDIT: "most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" -> This is the kind of dramatic conclusion I don't think we should be drawing.

NortySpock 6y ago

And back in the 1500s anyone could build a printer and rags for paper and crank out hundreds of broadsheets or pamphlets to be distributed all over town. Which lead to pulp fiction, the open exchange of ideas and the religious wars of the 1500s and onwards. Open exchange of ideas is not new. It's just faster and cheaper now.

colinmhayes 6y ago
Think about what you're saying. Almost no one could actually do that. You had to be quite wealthy and incredibly well educated.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  The point is that it was a step function. The bar suddenly dropped a huge amount. It went from "mostly just the church can produce written works" to "anyone who can afford the people to run a printing press can produce written works". It was a massive shock to the system.

closeparen 6y ago

The stolen election claim is put forward by the President of the United States, not some random people with blogs.

ehsankia 6y ago
The president's own information diet is often fueled from said blogs though. These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official, so where do you think he got them from? He regularly retweets and repeats talking points created in the deepest parts of the internet.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official Do you have a source for this comment? I'm pretty sure he heard about the allegations of fraud from actual purported witnesses who filed sworn affidavits. Those blogs that you're saying he gets the information from have hyperlinks to the documents filed by his legal team. I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    > witnesses who filed sworn affidavits Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper. If intelligence services or elections officials had found something, they would've announced it officially, instead they have announced the opposite. [0] [1] > I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around. Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet. [2] (and hundreds more) [0] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio... [1] https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-electio... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-la-ballots-idUSKBN27M236 https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-la-ballots-idUS...

anfilt 6y ago

What? “Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.” Do you realize how elitist and even authoritarian that statement is.

baq 6y ago
Does elitist and authoritarian imply false? Being reasonable is time consuming, expensive, requires constant education and a mind open to accepting that being wrong is ok. It’s elitist almost by definition. I don’t see how you got authoritarian in the equation, though.
- anfilt 6y ago
  The very notion of putting people in the category of sophisticated and unsophisticated, is a form of classism. It gets into the realm of authoritarianism when we start wanting people to be making decisions for others based on this. This not something we should be doing in a free society.
  - Jochim 6y ago
    I don't think it's classist to acknowledge that a lot of people do not have the privilege or time to thoroughly investigate the accuracy and biases of the information they are receiving. The response to this should be to ensure everyone does have the education and free time to be able to deal with this type of misinformation, but that runs contrary to the goals of those who benefit from the status quo.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Not if it is accompanied with a simultaneous desire offer the populace the tools to become more savvy at understanding the world around them with an education in history, politics, economics, ethics, science, etc.

notJim 6y ago

I agree with the first paragraph, but strongly disagree with the second. Those regimes that filtered information very narrowly constrained ideas to align with the status quo. That was sometimes good, but often held back people with minority views from finding and organizing with each other. Progressive social movements and positive new possibilities have come out of this, in addition to reactionary ones. What we do have to do is figure out how to have a shared view of the world that is less authoritarian than in the past. People now try to get the private platforms to enforce particular viewpoints through deplatforming and such. I am sympathetic to this as a practical matter, but don't think it is a viable long-term solution, as it will just lead us back to where we were, except with different people calling the shots.

jchrisa 6y ago

It's not that people are unable to understand, it's that understanding isn't part of the game. It's about group membership and a lot of that is about knowing the "phrases" that make you seem like a member. Easy bad ideas make for catchy phrases. The kinds of thoughts that are spreading across the US today would have been stopped by editorial accountability in an earlier era. I'm not sure education is the way to reduce the impact of easy bad ideas, because group members take on the catch phrases without thinking them through.

crazydoggers 6y ago

This is supposed to be why we have a republic rather than a radicle democracy. People forget, statistically half the population has an IQ below 100. And importantly, to be absolutely clear, that does not mean those people should not have a voice, or that they are “stupid”, far from it. It does however mean that certain issues are overwhelming complex to assume every American can make competent decisions on. Many of these rioters I’m sure don’t grasp how the very system they are protesting works on a fundamental level. If they believe the earth is flat, how can we expect them to understand the electoral college process, or the role of state versus federal government in our election process. Certainly everyone’s voices need to be heard. When people and their families are struggling, many of them doing the jobs that make this country function, they are ignored. So when a savior seems to come before them, we need to be very vigilant. We’ve seen these things happen before in history with other demagogues. We expect in this country that all voices should be heard in order to elect people who’s job it is to lead. That’s the definition of a republic. That leadership should have killed the conspiracies and falsehoods from the start, protecting those of the democracy who are vulnerable, many of them suffering from the consequences of this pandemic. Instead they sat on their hands. We need to hold our leaders responsible. We need to ask, en masse, for those leaders to hold each other accountable. We also need to take ownership as a people. Us. We consume this media. We have created these social media companies, and allowed them to spread this stuff. Ultimately each and every one of us is responsible. Let’s make sure going forward we ask more for those we ask to lead in our stead. Our vote isn’t the only thing we have to do that. We also have our voice and our 1st amendment. Let’s use it to the fullest.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable. Sophisticated people are just as prone to bias and cognitive error as unsophisticated people. The danger with limiting the spread of information is that the task of deciding what to censor is vulnerable to corruption by the interests of the censor.

bg24 6y ago

Yes. And a large chunk of population simply aligns based on emotion and do not have the desire to learn. This applies to all categories of people, including myself.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

Half of the population has a below-average IQ. Maybe 10% of those with an above average IQ are Dark Triad personalities somewhere on the toxic spectrum between narcissism and sociopathy. Economic values operate to reward them, and to punish - or at least inconvenience - those with less toxic values. So naturally the Dark Triad types have a very strong incentive to exploit the below-average. And the more below average and cognitively unsophisticated they are, the easier it is to exploit them. This isn't even about Left vs Right. It's about how you design a political and economic system that can handle these challenges without imploding.

atlgator 6y ago

It isn’t about information diversity. Diversity is sought to counteract the real problem, which is that news isn’t news. It’s entertainment. Journalism no longer presents fact. They present an interpretation of facts, ostensibly spun and sensationalized toward the ideology of their viewers. 30 years ago this didn’t happen. You could watch any of the nightly news shows and walk away more or less with the same understanding of current affairs. That’s not true anymore. Why did this happen? Because infotainment generates more viewers and therefore more ad revenue. It’s also a means for politicians to galvanize the electorate and stir up hysteria to their benefit.

rootsudo 6y ago

People back then could print anything. We have more population of people in the country, more then ever - and more outlets but it does not change how information is disseminated - from Thomas Paine Common Sense, to getting all the farmers with pitchfolks to revolt over whiskey tax to the newspaper boy shouting on the corner. It's really the same coin.

rayiner 6y ago

A lot of this stuff comes via talk radio, not twitter or YouTube, and that's not exactly new technology. I think you're confusing cause and effect. The problem is that people don't trust the same "professionals" to "filter" their news. People trusted Cronkite. There wasn't a huge market for "here's the news Cronkite won't tell you." Even when the country got super divided during Vietnam. Now, I don't know why people have lost faith in professionals. I have my theory, which is that there has been a really significant ideological divergence between the professional class and ordinary people. Let me give you an example. I don't want to litigate the specific example, but I'm just using it to illustrate. I read a lot of Matt Yglesias. He's very smart. But as far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in culture. Like, he doesn't believe it exists. He doesn't understand why people are attached to theirs. So when he talks about immigration, he draws these dichotomies "well there is the economic aspect of the immigration debate, then the xenophobia aspect." I come from a country where a bunch of brown Muslims declared independence from other brown Muslims over the particular Indo-Aryan language they spoke. Bangladeshis would flip out if, for example, a quarter of the country was suddenly Pakistani. Not because they dislike Pakistanis. (I.e. Xenophobia.) But they are very attached to their own culture and don't want anyone to come and change it. One of the most powerful forces in the world is peoples' attachment to soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs, etc. Yglesias boils all of that down to "xenophobia." Now, I'm quite the opposite. I get sad I'm going to die 10,000 miles away from where my ancestors are buried. I'm a bit jealous that my wife's family all lives within 2 hours of where they came over to Oregon on the wagon trains 170 years ago, while mine is scattered around the world in a diaspora. So when I listen to Yglesias, I cringe at some of his takes. I trust him because I've read a lot of his work, but I don't think he understands me or people like me. I can just imagine someone who don't want to put in the effort tuning him out. The professional class is increasingly full of people like Matt Yglesias. Not just "liberal" in terms of supporting this healthcare policy or that one. Or in thinking the Vietnam was was a bad idea. But "liberal" in terms of not sharing a lot of basic premises with ordinary people, like “is it legitimate to be concerned about culture changing in your community.” It’s very hard for people who don’t share those views on basic things like that to talk to each other productively. I think that's a huge part of eroding trust in professionals.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

simonh 6y ago

I think there’s a difference between diverse information being available, and people actually being exposed yo diverse viewpoints. With engagement driven social media more people than ever have a voice, but individuals are also fed a custom tuned diet of only a narrow range of views. If you go looking for different opinions you can find them, but most people don’t do that. They let an algorithm generate their opinions for them by excluding anything that might challenge their views from their feed.

pdonis 6y ago

> Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. Yes. And thirty or forty or fifty years ago (remember the Internet itself is more than 20 years old), we had even less diverse access. However, that does not mean the information we got back then was more reliable than the information we get now. It just means it was harder back then for we the people to spot when we were being misinformed, lied to, or just plain not told about things we should have been told about.

3131s 6y ago

This mindset is terrifying and yet most people here would probably agree with you. We are headed for dark times unless people like you are removed from positions of power.