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You're saying it like people choosing how to consume the information by themselves - rather than the choice being made by their betters somewhere deep inside th
by smsm42 4y ago
You're saying it like people choosing how to consume the information by themselves - rather than the choice being made by their betters somewhere deep inside the corporate guts of Google, Facebook, etc. - is a bad thing. It's nothing of the sort. And yes, if people are free to choose who to trust, somebody would make a mistake and trust wrong people. That's inevitable consequence of freedom. The only alternative is to have a choice taken away and everybody rely on the choices that somebody made for them.
> But it's cool because it will be a "conscious" choice
Exactly. You probably meant it to be sarcastic, but it's actually true.
- minsc_and_boo 4y agoWhat do you think about confirmation bias, and enabling it even further?
- sp332 4y agoI think it can't be solved by a search engine. If you search for conspiracy junk that's what will be surfaced. Attempts to correct for this will just introduce other biases until the search engine maker likes what they see. Introducing contrary content into search results will annoy users, and also surface fringe junk more frequently. A search engine is bias. If you wanted unbiased results, you would sort the results randomly. Maybe even return random URLs without regard for what was in the search query.
- smsm42 4y agoIt's a personal responsibility of each person to deal with their confirmation bias. You can't outsource it to a bunch of underpaid overworked subcontractors, even if they are called "fact checkers" or "moderation team" by their employers at Facebook or Google. The way to reduce the consequences of bad thinking patterns is not to censor more and force-feed people the "approved truth". It's to educate more and to earn people's trust by telling them the truth. It's not easy and it's not a guarantee of success. But it's the only way that can actually improve anything, as opposed to just creating more and more people that can't even talk to each other.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]