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Agree with the broad strokes here, but the fact is everyday people who consume news, as in every day they want to know what is happening politically largely don

Agree with the broad strokes here, but the fact is everyday people who consume news, as in every day they want to know what is happening politically largely don't want unbiased information. They want biased information, and that is what have learned in the internet age as you can see exactly what stories people read and click on. They hunger for confirmation bias cause it strengthens their way of making sense of the world and that gives them strength in their day to day life and decision making. They don't want to be challenged.

ssss11 5y ago
Is there any research paper to back up this claim? It could simply be that sensationalist headlines get people’s attention. As one data point I certainly don’t want biased information I’d prefer facts, including those that contradict my current worldview, so that I may be better informed. I see your point, and I do sometimes see people unwilling to be challenged in life, I just don’t think you can draw a conclusion that people want biased information from the media.
brnaftr361 5y ago
Imagine you're arguing with a child, "I don't want to!" says they, and you respond "Why not?", what answer comes next? "I don't like it!", perhaps "Because." I think there's a long chain of conditioning that we undergo, and I think it presses people into a genuinely inhumane sense that rationality must be prioritized, that you have to justify everything with some rational argument. The thing is we're human, and there's sort of two sides to every truth[0]. And there's autonomy, viewpoint, personal ethics, emotions, and all sorts of confounding processes that go on that simply can't be explained, but the conditioning compels one to explain it anyways, thus we seek confirmation, without regard for truth. To some extent I think that's what feeds the "misinformation" and "disinformation" markets. Society makes little room for the abstract man, society needs exact predictable units for its theories to function in practice. No free radicals. [0]Quashing infant mortality appears to be good, but there's the argument that it has effectively manufactured population booms in societies that aren't organized for the mass of people, viola, you've got a developing world population that suffers extremes of poverty on a totally unprecedented scale. But that latter argument would probably be discounted, right? It's a little indirect, correlation rather than causative, it presses certain intractable things like the concept of suffering, economic wellbeing, comparitive analysis with historical human condition shit...

ssss11 5y ago

Is there any research paper to back up this claim? It could simply be that sensationalist headlines get people’s attention. As one data point I certainly don’t want biased information I’d prefer facts, including those that contradict my current worldview, so that I may be better informed. I see your point, and I do sometimes see people unwilling to be challenged in life, I just don’t think you can draw a conclusion that people want biased information from the media.

brnaftr361 5y ago

Imagine you're arguing with a child, "I don't want to!" says they, and you respond "Why not?", what answer comes next? "I don't like it!", perhaps "Because." I think there's a long chain of conditioning that we undergo, and I think it presses people into a genuinely inhumane sense that rationality must be prioritized, that you have to justify everything with some rational argument. The thing is we're human, and there's sort of two sides to every truth[0]. And there's autonomy, viewpoint, personal ethics, emotions, and all sorts of confounding processes that go on that simply can't be explained, but the conditioning compels one to explain it anyways, thus we seek confirmation, without regard for truth. To some extent I think that's what feeds the "misinformation" and "disinformation" markets. Society makes little room for the abstract man, society needs exact predictable units for its theories to function in practice. No free radicals. [0]Quashing infant mortality appears to be good, but there's the argument that it has effectively manufactured population booms in societies that aren't organized for the mass of people, viola, you've got a developing world population that suffers extremes of poverty on a totally unprecedented scale. But that latter argument would probably be discounted, right? It's a little indirect, correlation rather than causative, it presses certain intractable things like the concept of suffering, economic wellbeing, comparitive analysis with historical human condition shit...