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> What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated set of ongoing collections of consensus. This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various f

> What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated set of ongoing collections of consensus. This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various facets on a topic is good. Consensus breeds complacency, avoids change, and the meek-but-correct get crushed. Let's teach our children how to identify opinion and compare opinions for reasonableness.

Spivak 5y ago
Supreme court opinions are collections of consensus despite containing dissenting opinions. The point is to organize all the information, data, analyses and opinions worth listening to instead of it being an ad-hoc stream of unconnected narratives. And if you say that somehow journalists can't sanity check and vet sources for quality then, for you, the battle is already lost and the solution is to just delete news.
glyph 5y ago
This is why consensus is a collection. Sometimes dialectical analysis is good; thesis, antithesis, synthesis is a tried and true formula that often works. But not always! Sometimes one side is just horseshit that gets mindlessly repeated in the interest of “balance”. In either case I’m not suggesting that the consensus ruthlessly censor dissenting views, rather that in order to make sense out of dissenting views, the strongest forms of each argument need to be presented together alongside accountability: editorial moderation and fact-checking. Even in the cases where the truth really is somewhere in the middle between two opposing camps, reading a sequence of side A #1, side B #1, side A #2, side B #2, in disconnected stories gives you a very skewed view subject to recency bias. For example you can’t easily check the history to see if a claim B is making in their second story was already debunked by A in their first one, and it’s a huge waste of time and energy for A to have to spend all their media budget just refuting that claim over and over because B keeps bringing it up every time there’s no fact checker right in front of them to call them on it (and even sometimes if there is). In other words the current media environment rewards being loud, wrong, simple and repetitive far over and above even the normal human bias for such things. It reinforces our worst cognitive habits.
enderm 5y ago
I agree - this article is a bit scary.

Spivak 5y ago

Supreme court opinions are collections of consensus despite containing dissenting opinions. The point is to organize all the information, data, analyses and opinions worth listening to instead of it being an ad-hoc stream of unconnected narratives. And if you say that somehow journalists can't sanity check and vet sources for quality then, for you, the battle is already lost and the solution is to just delete news.

glyph 5y ago

This is why consensus is a collection. Sometimes dialectical analysis is good; thesis, antithesis, synthesis is a tried and true formula that often works. But not always! Sometimes one side is just horseshit that gets mindlessly repeated in the interest of “balance”. In either case I’m not suggesting that the consensus ruthlessly censor dissenting views, rather that in order to make sense out of dissenting views, the strongest forms of each argument need to be presented together alongside accountability: editorial moderation and fact-checking. Even in the cases where the truth really is somewhere in the middle between two opposing camps, reading a sequence of side A #1, side B #1, side A #2, side B #2, in disconnected stories gives you a very skewed view subject to recency bias. For example you can’t easily check the history to see if a claim B is making in their second story was already debunked by A in their first one, and it’s a huge waste of time and energy for A to have to spend all their media budget just refuting that claim over and over because B keeps bringing it up every time there’s no fact checker right in front of them to call them on it (and even sometimes if there is). In other words the current media environment rewards being loud, wrong, simple and repetitive far over and above even the normal human bias for such things. It reinforces our worst cognitive habits.

enderm 5y ago

I agree - this article is a bit scary.