The marketplace for ideas has been transformed by mass media technologies. This tranformation has - like everything - come with both benefits and costs to the marketplace.
Costs:
1) It deludes people (and especially the uncurious) into thinking they know more than they really do because they've seen it on 'The News' or their social media feed. Thus they will feel minded to have an (ill-informed) opinion on a far greater range of subjects beyond their direct experience then they would in earlier times.
2) A tragedy of the mass media age is that it affords such a disproportionate voice to the one-track-minded, politico-activists, mouthy obsessives, narcissists and permanent malcontents. Well balanced people tend to be less media obsessed.
Benefits:
In very crude (and inevitably somewhat simplistic) terms, it seems to me that the invention of the search engine was a marvel and a massive boon for people with curiosity about the world beyond their direct experience. But then, after a few golden years, social media came along....something which - again it seems to me - has been almost entirely destructive.
"......Instead of an Orwellian thought police what we have is more like thought social workers and therapists - a great spider’s web of journalists, scriptwriters, opinionated actors, pop academics and advertising ‘creatives’, alternately flattering you, nagging at you and generally helping you to think correctly. It is a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone - even its own media elite - that brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It ‘keeps you informed’ with ‘The News’ and it entertains you with tv film and drama. It’s not - in the West anyway - generally a deliberate attempt to tell lies. It’s actually worse than that: the very concept is flawed. Flawed by virtue of editorial selectivity; by virtue of newsroom groupthink; by virtue of a journalistic mindset whereby the dramatic narrative is more important than the actual subject matter and worst of all by the illusion that the consumer of news can really know what is going on all over the world without any great effort......"
Interesting take. I think am a bit less pessimistic about social media than you - partly because I think things have always been terrible, and partly because I think people tend to exaggerate the badness of social media specifically, and partly because social media has benefits in addition to costs (which are real).
> 1) It deludes people (and especially the uncurious) into thinking they know more than they really do because they've seen it on 'The News' or their social media feed. Thus they will feel minded to have an (ill-informed) opinion on a far greater range of subjects beyond their direct experience then they would in earlier times.
It boggles my mind that this phenomenon (aka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect) gets essentially zero attention from anyone, it is very much in the root cause of all problems neighborhood.
It's a good piece, anyone taking aim at false idols like Pinker is on the right path in my books.
An interesting phenomenon: Pinker types love to point out the objective superiority of the "rules based, reality based, liberal order" over "conservatism", doing so is A Good Thing[1]. But if one is to point out the fact that this (hallucinated) "measure" is on a relative scale, that while Liberals "are" (may be, in the aggregate) better than Conservatives, it does not make them necessarily Good on an absolute scale....their interest in rationalism, objectivity, analysis, details, etc not only vanishes, but goes strongly negative.
And, it is extremely easy to invoke this behavior in someone, once you understand humans well enough to simply be on another level, little different than how adults tend to working from objectively higher levels of cognitive competency than children (something humans find not at all hard to grasp with respect to children vs adults, but impossible with adults vs adults, *but only on certain topics*).
I continue to believe that humans are not much more than biological Large Language Models, and not even very impressive ones at that. We've already been surpassed by our silicon counterparts on most measures, and they are picking up speed, while we seem to be declining if anything.
[1] Because objectivity is a good thing, or some other reason? When pressed, all you'll get is rhetoric, Just So Stories, and mental gymnastics (which is Good for them but not for others).
Thanks for the compliment....(hope you will take a free subscription?)
Interesting comment....I am ambivalent about Pinker. I think he's done good work and says a lot of sense - until he gets on to the 'Rights Revolution'.
I will gladly take a free subscription, thank you!
Regarding Pinker, and all humans who like to "tell us how it is": I like to stick to non-conventional evaluations that make *everybody* mad (when applied at the object level):
1. How good are they on an absolute scale? (That it is impossible to measure such things but we act otherwise makes the joke even funnier).
2. How good are they compared to how they *could* be?
Humans loooooooove pointing out flaws in other humans, and most any technique is fair game from the perspective of the critique....but when the tables are turned, all humans cry foul.
All humans are silly, because all humans have been raised to be silly, because we live in a silly culture, and culture bends "reality" like a wet noodle.
I suppose that it's possible that Rauch's book is excellent, or worth reading, but I gotta tell you given the subject matter, these claims on the page your link sends us to have me seriously doubting the credibility:
"In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories..."
Research has shown in fact that the amount of this was fairly tiny. Surely nowhere has it been demonstrated that such trolls and bots "nearly drowned the truth in a flood of..." anything.
And then there's the next claim: "Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, *and too often didn’t even seem to try*." [emphasis mine] The Twitter Files alone make the last part of this statement laughable, do they not?
Given how laughably false these two claims are, can you defend why one should read a book where these are given as reasons for buying it?
Yes I agree those claims are completely wrong, and there are other similar issues in the book as well. However, I think much of what he says is valuable as well. I might write a review of the book one day to highlight the big problems with it but also identify some of the insights...
I look forward to reading your review and hearing about the insights you say it holds. Given that it's *so* wrong about something fundamental that it's purporting to cover, hard for me to imagine that I'd buy it.
> "In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories..."
I've read MANY news articles on this topic, and they never give any hard evidence for the claims, they typically just link to various other articles that also never give any hard evidence.
The irony of this situation is astonishing, it goes to show you how much better US propaganda is, it is literally in our face all day every day, but people think they are being informed.
"it is possible to construct norms and incentives that channel the human desire for status and social approval into collectively beneficial ends."
Well, almost anything is *possible*. But *construct* is a pretty strong word. How exactly can you construct such norms and incentives? We can certainly hope they emerge. We even can - and should! - encourage them when they do. But I was unaware that the magic formula for constructing them existed!
Please don't hold back on this. Inquiring minds want to know!
Ha - It's a good question. I wish I had a good answer, but I'm still thinking through this general topic. In general, it's much easier to identify problems than it is to identify solutions...
I'm a Darwinian with my own Substack called Dysmemics: Bad ideas that harm civilisation.
One thing I haven't seen here (apologies if I've missed it) is that some 'truth' seekers are running business models purportedly disseminating truth, but who steal others ideas and present them as their own. The ultimate reason for this is that it gives them fitness points, either in material resources and reputation. Even though academia is failing, it still has more checks and balances against plagiarism that new media does. We don't disseminate truth if we're not also disseminating where those ideas originated. It's something new media needs to address before it becomes as cliquish as the academia it's setting out to replace.
I think I know where you're coming from, but I'd say the various methods our various intelligent ideologues have come up with throughout the years are flawed, so of course they fail (as does deep rooted commitment, integrity, etc). Human's biggest shortcomings are falling in love with their own ideas, which causes blindness and delusion, science is a fine example of how even the most powerful institutions are vulnerable to it.
Nice essay Dan! Unsurprisingly I agree with almost all of it :)
However, I don't know if I buy the conclusion! "The idea that truth will ultimately emerge victorious in a free marketplace of ideas is incorrect". If I've understood right, you've actually amassed this argument: the idea that truth will ultimately emerge victorious in an imperfect marketplace of ideas is incorrect.
Indeed you seem to give two reasons why the modern public sphere isn't a free marketplace in the fullest sense of the term:
- "media is highly fragmented, meaning that the arguments of different sides are rarely brought into contact". In other words, different suppliers do not get directly compared with one another. This mitigates against the logic of supply and demand.
- "there are also profound asymmetries in the power, resources, and influence of different interest groups within society". In other words, different suppliers have differential access to the market. This too mitigates against the logic of supply and demand.
It seems to me that what e.g. juries show is that a properly free market is indeed effective. The challenge is that such markets are very hard to achieve: in general but in modern societies in particular.
imo what you're missing is that even though I agree that the truth is *more likely* to ultimately emerge victorious in a free marketplace of ideas than under any other real-world system one can imagine ["democracy is the worst form of government ever invented...except for all the others"],
a) the timing at best is immensely uncertain, and
b) it is not guaranteed to do so.
I agree 100% with Dan's point that a free marketplace of ideas is not guaranteed to deliver truth as the victor all the time [at minimum, unlike asserted in Econ 101, the marketplace of ideas can never be "perfectly efficient" as the market for any given economic commodity can be reasonably modeled to be].
But perhaps like you, I wish he wouldn't bury the "worst system...except for all the others" point so far down that anyone not reading carefully might conclude - or use the piece to justify - that the free marketplace of ideas is NOT an overwhelmingly important thing for a just and prosperous society to have.
Hence the reason the Founders made it the *First* Amendment...
The marketplace for ideas has been transformed by mass media technologies. This tranformation has - like everything - come with both benefits and costs to the marketplace.
Costs:
1) It deludes people (and especially the uncurious) into thinking they know more than they really do because they've seen it on 'The News' or their social media feed. Thus they will feel minded to have an (ill-informed) opinion on a far greater range of subjects beyond their direct experience then they would in earlier times.
2) A tragedy of the mass media age is that it affords such a disproportionate voice to the one-track-minded, politico-activists, mouthy obsessives, narcissists and permanent malcontents. Well balanced people tend to be less media obsessed.
Benefits:
In very crude (and inevitably somewhat simplistic) terms, it seems to me that the invention of the search engine was a marvel and a massive boon for people with curiosity about the world beyond their direct experience. But then, after a few golden years, social media came along....something which - again it seems to me - has been almost entirely destructive.
I discussed these things at greater length in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
"......Instead of an Orwellian thought police what we have is more like thought social workers and therapists - a great spider’s web of journalists, scriptwriters, opinionated actors, pop academics and advertising ‘creatives’, alternately flattering you, nagging at you and generally helping you to think correctly. It is a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone - even its own media elite - that brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It ‘keeps you informed’ with ‘The News’ and it entertains you with tv film and drama. It’s not - in the West anyway - generally a deliberate attempt to tell lies. It’s actually worse than that: the very concept is flawed. Flawed by virtue of editorial selectivity; by virtue of newsroom groupthink; by virtue of a journalistic mindset whereby the dramatic narrative is more important than the actual subject matter and worst of all by the illusion that the consumer of news can really know what is going on all over the world without any great effort......"
Interesting take. I think am a bit less pessimistic about social media than you - partly because I think things have always been terrible, and partly because I think people tend to exaggerate the badness of social media specifically, and partly because social media has benefits in addition to costs (which are real).
Yes.... but social media was only a (perhaps overly-grumpy) tail-end of my comment. In substance it was about the cost/benefits of mass media per se.
> 1) It deludes people (and especially the uncurious) into thinking they know more than they really do because they've seen it on 'The News' or their social media feed. Thus they will feel minded to have an (ill-informed) opinion on a far greater range of subjects beyond their direct experience then they would in earlier times.
It boggles my mind that this phenomenon (aka: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect) gets essentially zero attention from anyone, it is very much in the root cause of all problems neighborhood.
Mine too.....but it does get a lot of attention on my Substack!.....this for example: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
It's a good piece, anyone taking aim at false idols like Pinker is on the right path in my books.
An interesting phenomenon: Pinker types love to point out the objective superiority of the "rules based, reality based, liberal order" over "conservatism", doing so is A Good Thing[1]. But if one is to point out the fact that this (hallucinated) "measure" is on a relative scale, that while Liberals "are" (may be, in the aggregate) better than Conservatives, it does not make them necessarily Good on an absolute scale....their interest in rationalism, objectivity, analysis, details, etc not only vanishes, but goes strongly negative.
And, it is extremely easy to invoke this behavior in someone, once you understand humans well enough to simply be on another level, little different than how adults tend to working from objectively higher levels of cognitive competency than children (something humans find not at all hard to grasp with respect to children vs adults, but impossible with adults vs adults, *but only on certain topics*).
I continue to believe that humans are not much more than biological Large Language Models, and not even very impressive ones at that. We've already been surpassed by our silicon counterparts on most measures, and they are picking up speed, while we seem to be declining if anything.
[1] Because objectivity is a good thing, or some other reason? When pressed, all you'll get is rhetoric, Just So Stories, and mental gymnastics (which is Good for them but not for others).
Thanks for the compliment....(hope you will take a free subscription?)
Interesting comment....I am ambivalent about Pinker. I think he's done good work and says a lot of sense - until he gets on to the 'Rights Revolution'.
I will gladly take a free subscription, thank you!
Regarding Pinker, and all humans who like to "tell us how it is": I like to stick to non-conventional evaluations that make *everybody* mad (when applied at the object level):
1. How good are they on an absolute scale? (That it is impossible to measure such things but we act otherwise makes the joke even funnier).
2. How good are they compared to how they *could* be?
Humans loooooooove pointing out flaws in other humans, and most any technique is fair game from the perspective of the critique....but when the tables are turned, all humans cry foul.
All humans are silly, because all humans have been raised to be silly, because we live in a silly culture, and culture bends "reality" like a wet noodle.
In case you're not clear about what to do...click on this link:
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ Then press 'subscribe' and then 'no pledge'. And that's it.... done.
I suppose that it's possible that Rauch's book is excellent, or worth reading, but I gotta tell you given the subject matter, these claims on the page your link sends us to have me seriously doubting the credibility:
"In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories..."
Research has shown in fact that the amount of this was fairly tiny. Surely nowhere has it been demonstrated that such trolls and bots "nearly drowned the truth in a flood of..." anything.
And then there's the next claim: "Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, *and too often didn’t even seem to try*." [emphasis mine] The Twitter Files alone make the last part of this statement laughable, do they not?
Given how laughably false these two claims are, can you defend why one should read a book where these are given as reasons for buying it?
Yes I agree those claims are completely wrong, and there are other similar issues in the book as well. However, I think much of what he says is valuable as well. I might write a review of the book one day to highlight the big problems with it but also identify some of the insights...
I look forward to reading your review and hearing about the insights you say it holds. Given that it's *so* wrong about something fundamental that it's purporting to cover, hard for me to imagine that I'd buy it.
But maybe it'll be a really fantastic review! :-)
> "In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories..."
I've read MANY news articles on this topic, and they never give any hard evidence for the claims, they typically just link to various other articles that also never give any hard evidence.
The irony of this situation is astonishing, it goes to show you how much better US propaganda is, it is literally in our face all day every day, but people think they are being informed.
"it is possible to construct norms and incentives that channel the human desire for status and social approval into collectively beneficial ends."
Well, almost anything is *possible*. But *construct* is a pretty strong word. How exactly can you construct such norms and incentives? We can certainly hope they emerge. We even can - and should! - encourage them when they do. But I was unaware that the magic formula for constructing them existed!
Please don't hold back on this. Inquiring minds want to know!
Ha - It's a good question. I wish I had a good answer, but I'm still thinking through this general topic. In general, it's much easier to identify problems than it is to identify solutions...
A Nobel prize likely awaits you if you can come up with a replicable solution…
We could try (well, in theory anyways) using propositional modal logic for a change, instead of just pretending that we do.
I'm a Darwinian with my own Substack called Dysmemics: Bad ideas that harm civilisation.
One thing I haven't seen here (apologies if I've missed it) is that some 'truth' seekers are running business models purportedly disseminating truth, but who steal others ideas and present them as their own. The ultimate reason for this is that it gives them fitness points, either in material resources and reputation. Even though academia is failing, it still has more checks and balances against plagiarism that new media does. We don't disseminate truth if we're not also disseminating where those ideas originated. It's something new media needs to address before it becomes as cliquish as the academia it's setting out to replace.
Dan
Always learn from your notes.
On the problem of finding ‘truth’ . . .
I’ve read and applied this kingly counsel for six decades. There is no substitute for integrity and honesty.
No procedure, no algorithm, no system can replace genuine ‘fear of God’ and deep determination to never give up fight for ‘truth’
Note father (king) says God gives the ‘start of wisdom’.
Human’s required to complete the ‘puzzle’ on their own, with life long determination.
Not what many believers practice.
Godly wisdom not guaranteed. But, possible.
“The proverbs of Solʹo·mon, the son of David, the king of Israel:
To learn wisdom and discipline;
To understand wise sayings;
To acquire the discipline that gives insight,
Righteousness, good judgment, and uprightness;
To impart shrewdness to the inexperienced;
To give a young man knowledge and thinking ability.
A wise person listens and takes in more instruction;
A man of understanding acquires skillful direction
To understand a proverb and a puzzling saying,
The words of the wise and their riddles.
The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge.
Only fools despise wisdom and discipline.’’
Taught this to my daughter and her son.
Seems was successful.
Truth not from popularity or feelings.
Thanks
Clay
> No procedure, no algorithm, no system can replace genuine ‘fear of God’ and deep determination to never give up fight for ‘truth’
Propositional modal logic can't replace that approach, but it can *easily* outperform it for truth/untruth seeking.
Anza
I agree. Motive is necessary but not sufficient.
However, modernity wants to replace sincere, deep rooted commitment, integrity - with a method, a blind hope that method replaces judgement.
Think feyerabend’s “Against Method”.
Remember Einstein never accepted Bohr’s (modern) quantum theory.
Gödel’s work on the incompleteness of mathematics.
Judgement. Insight, discernment can’t be avoided by a rule.
Of course, correct reasoning, valid evidence, absolutely essential.
However, the modern finding that -‘no amount of data will ever only allow of one explanation.’
Called the ‘under determining of theory by data’.
Thanks
Clay
I think I know where you're coming from, but I'd say the various methods our various intelligent ideologues have come up with throughout the years are flawed, so of course they fail (as does deep rooted commitment, integrity, etc). Human's biggest shortcomings are falling in love with their own ideas, which causes blindness and delusion, science is a fine example of how even the most powerful institutions are vulnerable to it.
> Think feyerabend’s “Against Method”.
Thank you for this tip!
Nice essay Dan! Unsurprisingly I agree with almost all of it :)
However, I don't know if I buy the conclusion! "The idea that truth will ultimately emerge victorious in a free marketplace of ideas is incorrect". If I've understood right, you've actually amassed this argument: the idea that truth will ultimately emerge victorious in an imperfect marketplace of ideas is incorrect.
Indeed you seem to give two reasons why the modern public sphere isn't a free marketplace in the fullest sense of the term:
- "media is highly fragmented, meaning that the arguments of different sides are rarely brought into contact". In other words, different suppliers do not get directly compared with one another. This mitigates against the logic of supply and demand.
- "there are also profound asymmetries in the power, resources, and influence of different interest groups within society". In other words, different suppliers have differential access to the market. This too mitigates against the logic of supply and demand.
It seems to me that what e.g. juries show is that a properly free market is indeed effective. The challenge is that such markets are very hard to achieve: in general but in modern societies in particular.
Am I missing something important?
imo what you're missing is that even though I agree that the truth is *more likely* to ultimately emerge victorious in a free marketplace of ideas than under any other real-world system one can imagine ["democracy is the worst form of government ever invented...except for all the others"],
a) the timing at best is immensely uncertain, and
b) it is not guaranteed to do so.
I agree 100% with Dan's point that a free marketplace of ideas is not guaranteed to deliver truth as the victor all the time [at minimum, unlike asserted in Econ 101, the marketplace of ideas can never be "perfectly efficient" as the market for any given economic commodity can be reasonably modeled to be].
But perhaps like you, I wish he wouldn't bury the "worst system...except for all the others" point so far down that anyone not reading carefully might conclude - or use the piece to justify - that the free marketplace of ideas is NOT an overwhelmingly important thing for a just and prosperous society to have.
Hence the reason the Founders made it the *First* Amendment...
Yes I should have been clearer about this as I think some people (wrongly) took me to be arguing for censorship.