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Who is the "we" that is doing the inventing? The News God[1] with the power to correct perverse incentives and keep prisoners from defecting? Doesn't exist. The
by afarrell 12y ago
Who is the "we" that is doing the inventing? The News God[1] with the power to correct perverse incentives and keep prisoners from defecting? Doesn't exist. The committee of Folks Who Care About Policy And Represent a Broad Cross-Section of Society but Don't Get into Stupid Arguments? Doesn't exist.
Even if they did, an organization would discover that they could get more views and exert more power using titilatory stories. What you propose is not a stable Nash Equilibrium.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
EDIT: re-read and that seems to be kinda your point. Apologies if it is and I'm oddly argumentative.
To continue, one reason why organizations use stories is that stories are one of the data structures more efficiently-implemented in our minds.
- neilk 12y agoThis is a great point, but we also know that institutional, internal information distribution systems, of the kind I mentioned, don't fall prey to that. (They may fall prey to other things -- agreeing with the boss, groupthink, etc.) Anyway the reason why is because they have different incentives. The question is how to make incentives like that work for society, hopefully while keeping the critical independence of the media. We can't imagine that now, but we have new funding forms like Kickstarter, and Wikipedia is an existence proof for achieving consensus about what claims are well-sourced. But I think we agree that it's not a great idea to run society on an information system that gets paid every time it stimulates our basest impulses for the lowest possible cost. The endgame of that is Buzzfeed.