[everdrive]

It doesn't even have to be ads. The people who run it have their own ideological sense of right and wrong. And no matter what you think of their moral stance so far, there's nothing to prevent them from changing their values in the future. If you rely on them to think, you're also letting them cordon off certain kinds of thoughts.

[glenstein]

And this is where it gets into difficult questions around objectivity and misinformation. Because objective knowledge is more under threat now than it has ever been. And it's in part because we don't have an agreed upon consensus canon of knowledge. Or rather, there's at least skepticism of such things.

But I think there's good reasons for believing that people as individuals and through collective efforts at institutional levels are capable of doing the work of making these distinctions. And for understanding the doubts not as hard one intellectual achievements that have improved upon things, but as cynical and self-interested attempts to dispute consensus knowledge in painted as biased as is now happening with attacks on Wikipedia.

So I'm actually not concerned about our inability to do Build out and deploy reliable information. I think what I am concerned about is the financial incentives that could complicate that as well as the misinformation environment which seeks to challenge and dispute the possibility of consensus knowledge, and people impressionable to those misinformation campaigns.

[lolinder]

You're conflating a few concepts:

* Objective knowledge

* Consensus knowledge

Consensus knowledge is not the same thing as objective knowledge, nor is it in and of itself a Good Thing.

Consensus knowledge is simply the current consensus of a specific group of people, who themselves bring a ton of subjectivity to their analysis. The smaller that group and the more self-selecting it is, the lower the value of their consensus, because of necessity they represent only a tiny fraction of the sum total of human experience. And the larger the group is and the more dynamic the selection process, the more difficult it becomes to summarize their perspective into any sort of consensus knowledge.

Objective knowledge is not consensus knowledge, objective knowledge is the platonic ideal to which consensus knowledge aspires.

Conflating consensus knowledge with objective knowledge is how we ended up in a place where so many people across the board question the idea that objective truth even exists! Instead of where the scientific method started—with a philosophy built around the idea that there is objective truth and we are capable of better and better modeling it through rigorous tests—we're in a place where some people have conflated the map for the territory, leading others to question whether the territory exists at all.

[glenstein]

I'm not sure I understand where you're seeing a conflation? I promise you that I was already familiar with the notions of objective and consensus as you described them.

I acknowledge that these are distinct concepts, but there's nothing in what I said above where I'm equating them. At least on charitable interpretation.

I'm also not sure what I agree with much or any of your supplementary analysis. Just to pick one example, I don't think our confidence in the measurement of the Higgs Boson is in any way contaminated by the fact that the consensus on it exists within a self-selected academic community, or that it fails to sufficiently sample the global population.