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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is well informed on all issues. You just can't be. You can't fact check everything.

We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid)

This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham.

I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.

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A lot of partially informed individuals en masse may act more "informed" on the whole than what you're giving them credit for. It's also a less brittle organizational structure than having a few authorities who are supposedly totally or mostly well informed. If any of the authorities aren't actually as well informed as you'd thought, it has a large impact. It would take a very substantial number of peers in a peer to peer system to create the same sort of miscalibration.

And yet, look at how well the average Trump voter is informed about Trump.

This might work if you leave the system undisturbed, but there are other forces involved in this process your model doesn't account for.

It's the equivalent of buying out EC2 instances for an hour or so and "recalibrating" your P2P mesh. And it wouldn't fix itself.

Precisely, the marketplace of ideas has become the cesspit of lies and we need to pull ourselves and everyone else out of it.

What comes after we pull ourselves out of the "marketplace of ideas?" With no marketplace where will original thought come from?

The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.

A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.

It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.

I'm pretty sure people like Steven Crowder do not contribute to any diamond discovery process, can YouTube deplatform/demonetize him yet?

And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.

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