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by neonological
1832 days ago
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"When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths... We've been wrong before, and we're likely going to be wrong again...That the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas. In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side. The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." - Oliver Wendell Homes on the marketplace of ideas. Unknown to most people, our modern idea of free speech was not founded by the constitution but by a judge of the name Oliver Wendell Homes. The history and story of how our modern concept of free speech came to be what is today is very relevant to the free speech problems faced by the ACLU. If you're interested I recommend this podcast episode: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/what-.... Really relevant and really interesting. |
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https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
In a nutshell, there are only 24 hours in a day and humans have limited cognitive capacity; news and factual assertions tend to propagate fastest based on perceived significance and urgency, and it's easy to fake those qualities.
Informally, consider the existence of tabloid newspapers and clickbait advertising on most news sites. I'm sure you're familiar with companies like Taboola and Outbrain that put up ads with iconic imagery and headlines like 'cure unwanted medical condition with this one weird trick' or 'Insider secret revealed: professionals hate him' etc. etc. Now, you can block ads with the help of an extension if you're technically competent, but let's face it, the web is awash in fake content. If you go to a popular news site without any adblocking software, it's absolute hot garbage, and sadly you can easily find a correlation between particular ideological tendencies and the incidence of garbage.
The bottom line here is that that dishonesty is profitable and in marketplace of ideas terms that means it's easier to sell a defective product than a reliable one, because people prioritize emotional activation over truth. So picture the marketplace of ideas a a bunch of ideologues shouting out their thoughts on everything from the right end from which to eat an egg to what humanity's overall priorities should be. Now picture that the more successful ideologues purchase megaphones, platforms, and eventually gian sound systems. A naive consumer entering this marketplace is naturally going to accord the greatest weight to the loudest signals because it requires a tremendous amount of work to do otherwise.