| > is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them? I mean we currently have the exact opposite problem. We can definitively answer that people hearing everything and anything is quantifiably a bad thing for a good-sized portion of the population. See here[1] and here[2] for some quick examples. >Who watches the watcher? Transparency is not antithetical or exclusive to any system that allows information to be properly editorialized. Dystopian hypotheticals kind of fall flat on their face when we have practical problems that run completely counter to some far off totalitarian future. The worst part about the media landscape for me is not the massive maze of crap you have to wade through, it's that there's enough people willing to lend credence to some part(s) of that maze of crap. It can often remove any hope of a reasonable foundation for a conversation on whatever topic. I think the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[3] applies well to this topic. >The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. The current U.S. political landscape is a perfect example of this. We have people buying into certain political mythologies (either outright lies or just plain conspiracy theories, in regards to certain political factions and general policies) with no factual basis and it's wasting what is essentially valuable political capital at an alarming rate. And disappointingly, the actual conspiracies we do have evidence for are disregarded by the very same population that seems to be completely incapable of discerning and analyzing information (or misinformation) in general, across any field. Say, I don't know, climate change. [1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912917721061 [2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2331/epdf [3]: https://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-princ... |