[Isamu]

This is about journalism, in an age when journalism is being bulldozed by cheap content, AI hallucinations and other clickbait tactics. Journalism still has the idea of finding facts, things that correspond to something in reality.

It’s been shown that people in fact prefer to have their beliefs confirmed, rather than challenged by investigative reporting, hence the decline in real journalism, because it is both more difficult and in the end less popular across a large audience.

[munificent]

I disagree with the cynical take in your second sentence.

I think people prefer to be right. Any animal that wants to walk the Earth successfully has an intrinsic need to understand the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Wanting the fruit tree to be right outside the cave doesn't make it so.

But that desire to have correct beliefs is complex in humans where we also have beliefs about ourselves and others have beliefs about us. We don't want to just be right, but believe ourselves good at being right, and be known to others as someone who is usually right.

That puts some hysteresis in our belief system where we have a tendency to disregard evidence that goes against out beliefs for a while until it's sufficiently compelling.

But, also, no one wants to be a gullible rube or an out-of-touch idiot. We will update our beliefs when in a social and information environment that permits us to do so. The problem today is largely that we have so much choice of our social and information environment, then it's much easier to select an echo chamber that lets us think we're already right then be confronted with the reality that we're wrong.

The decline in investigative journalism can, I think, be explained largely in economic terms. The news has always been driven by ads. Even when people paid for papers, the subscription cost didn't fully cover the newspapers' expenses. The classified ads filled that gap.

Then the Internet arose and transferred advertising out of classifieds and into Craigslist, eBay, and others. And it transferred human attention out of newspapers and into social media. There simply weren't enough resources left to fund expensive investigative journalism.

[nonethewiser]

I enjoyed your thoughts on people preferring to be right but having competing personal interests.

I have started and stopped writing several chains of thought related to it. But it makes me think about what categories of things we may prefer to be right about. And how they do or do not fit into the model you described. For example, empirical (the elephant weights more than a mouse), pragmatic ("hot water is good for your health" in Chinese culture), moral (murder is bad), etc. "Truth", "being right" etc. are just loaded terms I guess. The claims about being able to function effectively seem largely true for the more empirical stuff but the sort of information silos discussed online draw more idealogical lines.

Also made me think how a nihilist or social constructivist might behave or model things differently. it just seems like if you have a more relativist interpretation of truth, being right and believing in something is just the same thing. So it would be literally impossible for those things to be in conflict (either naturally or from the perspective of the person).

[Isamu]

You are right, I am being casual in asserting what “people prefer”.

You assert that people prefer to be right, I agree but in practice “being right” requires having to accept changes in your beliefs, and that’s painful.

Also “being right” requires some effort to check what the facts are, and that is arduous when people are busy with life.

As a result I think people prefer to feel like they’re right rather than dig deeper, and so they prefer information sources that tend to confirm their beliefs.

[munificent]

Behavior makes a lot more sense when you realize that humans are trying to have as accurate a view of the world as possible while also conserving cognitive resources. Running a brain is actually astonishingly expensive in terms of calories, so we've evolved to be judicious in how much thought we put into things.

Changing an existing belief is hard because we already spent effort acquiring the belief in the first place. Throwing that out should be expensive because otherwise we risk thrashing where we are constantly vacillating between competing beliefs. It makes more sense in terms of efficiency and being able to take action if there is some hysteresis and beliefs are sticky.

Note that while people don't change beliefs easily, they do acquire them pretty easily. If I tell you something that doesn't directly conflict with an existing belief, it's easy to absorb.