I know this is just a small detail and not what you wrote about, but: much of your comment on the recommender systems post hinged on news articles being uncorrelated with the truth. Do you have data to back that up?
I’m replying here because it’s a strong claim that’s relevant to many things beyond that specific post.
I have data in the sense that when I read news articles and check how correct they are, they are usually not very correct. (You can have more nuance than this, e.g. facts about what mundane stuff happened in the world tend to be correct.)
I don’t have data in the sense that I don’t have a convenient list of articles and ways they were wrong such that I could easily persuade someone else of this belief of mine. (Though here’s one example of an article that you at least have to read closely if you want to not be misled.)
Also, I could justify ignoring those two particular news articles without this general claim, at least to myself. I did briefly look at them before I wrote that comment; I didn’t particularly expect to believe them but if they were the rare good kind of news article I would have noticed.
For radicalization, I know specific people who have looked into it and come away unconvinced; Stefan Schubert links to some of this work in a different comment on that post.
The article about social media being addictive is basically just a bunch of quotes from people rather than particular studies / data. It generally seems pretty easy to find people saying things you want so I don’t update much on “such-and-such person said X”. I’ve also once experienced and many times heard stories of journalists adversarially quoting people to make it sound like their position was very different than it actually was, so I usually don’t even update on “such-and-such person believes X”.
I know this is just a small detail and not what you wrote about, but: much of your comment on the recommender systems post hinged on news articles being uncorrelated with the truth. Do you have data to back that up?
I’m replying here because it’s a strong claim that’s relevant to many things beyond that specific post.
I have data in the sense that when I read news articles and check how correct they are, they are usually not very correct. (You can have more nuance than this, e.g. facts about what mundane stuff happened in the world tend to be correct.)
I don’t have data in the sense that I don’t have a convenient list of articles and ways they were wrong such that I could easily persuade someone else of this belief of mine. (Though here’s one example of an article that you at least have to read closely if you want to not be misled.)
Also, I could justify ignoring those two particular news articles without this general claim, at least to myself. I did briefly look at them before I wrote that comment; I didn’t particularly expect to believe them but if they were the rare good kind of news article I would have noticed.
For radicalization, I know specific people who have looked into it and come away unconvinced; Stefan Schubert links to some of this work in a different comment on that post.
The article about social media being addictive is basically just a bunch of quotes from people rather than particular studies / data. It generally seems pretty easy to find people saying things you want so I don’t update much on “such-and-such person said X”. I’ve also once experienced and many times heard stories of journalists adversarially quoting people to make it sound like their position was very different than it actually was, so I usually don’t even update on “such-and-such person believes X”.