Biased News Media or Biased Readers? An Experiment on Trust

At least in the British system people acknowledge this as a reality of newspapers, which generally endorse specific parties or candidates. The TV news is more of a problem. I'm not sure the problem with BBC political coverage is bias per se as that much of it is terrible and includes inviting terrible people to be on Question Time because they generate lots of controversy.

(It's also interesting that we on the internet consider doxxing to be some sort of Queensbury rules violation, while newspapers consider finding someone and interrogating them on their doorstep in front of their family to be standard operating procedure. Not to mention hacking their voicemail.)

I don't think it's purely about financial incentives to be honest. I suspect that many journalists view themselves as primarily social activists rather than chroniclers, and being able to directly influence society in a major way is effectively seen as part of the compensation package.

Read any story that involves Russia and spend a few minutes doing fact checking. Or check back after a week. You'll find the story is very likely to be factually wrong and might have been retracted.

You don't need anything more than Google to reveal that the stories are false, sometimes not even that - just reading the story carefully and watching for internal contradictions is sufficient. But almost everyone I meet believes these stories completely.

For some reason lots of people desperately want to believe that Russia is the bogeyman. They not only won't use simple and easy tools available to them, they actually get upset when other people do it.

Even worse -- a decentralized information verification system will endorse the opinions of the few while claiming to be majority-rule.

Speaking of truth, framing is very important and for a platform like this: a majority opinion wouldn’t represent “indisputable truth” but rather “our current best collective guess”. You don’t treat knowledge in your head as immutable, you update it when you find better information (ideally).

I guess if I was going to work on such a system I'd start with better commenting and forum systems.

I attribute a lot of the belief that the past was an intellectual wonderland to the fact that in the past, only intellectuals had a chance to communicate over the mechanisms that were both widespread and lasting. There is a extremely effectual selection process on what has survived to be seen by us as we look back in time that biases us to see a more intellectual, positive time. As communication became cheaper, more and more people become involved, and inevitably that pulled the center away from the extreme intellectual center that it occupied before, by sheer regression to the mean.

But there is one relevant change. Even fairly recently you could go online and hear people cite the idea that an argument is separate from the arguer, and that it's a fallacy to attack the arguer. That's no longer accepted by any culture I'm aware of, up to and including academic culture which has wholeheartedly embraced the idea of attacking the arguer and discrediting them at the most fundamental levels they possibly can. There's hardly even anybody paying lip service to the idea, except a few people who haven't realized that time has passed them by and a few diehard idealists. (Like me, who still thinks it's a basic foundation of anything worthy of being called "intellectual". But I recognize that my belief in that statement doesn't make it something that exists in the real world.) There was a time when I could debate things on the Internet, and if insulted, other people would cite the principle and ignore the insults. Now making unpopular arguments carries real risks of being the target of an Internet mob, and every argument is unpopular with a lot of people. Yes, that is a real change that has happened.

You could argue that had this level of easy communication existed in any previous era, the same result would have obtained. I'd be down with arguing that humans fundamentally lack the ability to intellectually debate things at this scale and mob mentality would have been inevitable in any time in history where such technology was introduced and that there is nothing necessarily special about today's people. But it is a change that has occurred in the past 20 years for sure. Posting controversial opinions online has always required a certain amount of fortitude for the resulting responses, but there was never a mechanism that allowed the responses to magnify into a feedback loop so large that it could cost you your job or more.

By the best interpretation of this statement, it is highly confused as to what sociopathy is, and may be harmful in its belief that normal human cognitive biases are signs of mentally ill behavior. It makes total sense that people would have inconsistent metrics applied to themselves vs to others. It's normal human psychology.