A dear, admirable friend of mine recently wrote:
Well, [I agree that Facebook doesn’t want to fix their fake news problem]. But the real problem [with the virality fake news] is people not turning to real journalism anymore.
There are several assumptions that I think underlie this statement, all of which are incorrect:
I may, of course, be misunderstanding his point of view; but, absent a better alternative for now, I will proceed to rebut my interpretation above.
If any one of these four is false, then the link from “people not turning to real journalism anymore” to good government is a false trail. Here I explain why all four of them are false, but if you find my arguments on one of these four points unconvincing, please have the patience to consider whether at least one of them receives its quietus here.
Journalism, since its 17th-century inception, is done by people who are ignorant about the topic they are writing about; they learn enough about the topic to be able to explain it authoritatively to others, but their explanations are nearly always ridiculous to anyone knowledgeable about the topic. Worse, journalists are only allowed to explain things that are timely — which is the time when the least is known about them.
This has resulted in journalists clothing all manner of ridiculous lies in the solemn garments of Received Wisdom, with the lightest dusting of background information generally cribbed from some other recent article on the subject.
(Maybe you remember the period when dozens of articles mentioning the World Wide Web described it as “the graphical section of the Internet”, when of course the internet does not and did not possess sections; the World Wide Web was not and is not graphical but primarily textual; and many graphical applications that are not Web browsers also ran on and run on the internet. The only way such nonsense could propagate is if each ignorant journalist copied it from an earlier one.)
Journalism’s standard of exceptionality as a factor of newsworthiness also undercuts its reliability, as is widely observed; famously, it has led many people to imagine that commercial airline flight in the US in the 1970s and later was much more dangerous than driving, because plane crashes are exceptional, while car crashes are not.
This makes journalism, even when it achieves its highest standards, as in Consumer Reports, extremely poor as a source for information. But journalism has never frequently achieved its highest standards. Most journalism has always been schlock. The Pulitzer Prize is named after a yellow journalist noted for his sensationalism and unconcern for veracity.
Furthermore, even when reliable information is available, reading it has never been very popular; novels have always been much more popular. This seriously limits the possible readership of a would-be provider of reliable information — the kind of people who think a 5,000-word article is a “long read” are never going to obtain much information about anything outside their direct personal experience.
This has gotten worse in recent years as newsrooms have cut their budgets, but it was always thus: in the 17th century when journalism began, when Hearst arguably launched the Spanish-American War, when reporters interviewed me in my childhood, when Crichton formulated his famous Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in 2002, when the New York Times shrank from calling torture “torture” for a decade, and today.
But suppose that the information you get is reliably correct. Instead of reading conceited ignorants parroting the misunderstood words of whatever expert they were able to talk to, you can instead read the brilliantly expressed, deeply knowledgeable analysis of the world’s leading experts on a topic, which furthermore is carefully contextualized and prioritized so that you aren’t left with big holes in your knowledge. This would be like reading a good textbook on a subject, instead of the low bar journalism aspires to reach and almost invariably fails at, because of the structural problems I described above.
And let's suppose, improbably for nearly all humans, that you actually do read the whole thing. Is this enough to make you informed?
No. If you read a textbook and do not do the exercises, you still do not gain the understanding that the textbook author attempted to convey to you. You cannot become informed about a topic merely by reading about it. You must practice it.
The catalogue of human folly is limitless. Many humans smoke several cigarettes per day, thus making a decision several times a day that they know will likely cause them to die in agony while those they love most watch helplessly. We have all seen humans neglect important parts of their lives until they fell apart — a marriage, a diabetic condition, a leaking roof, their own illiteracy. We all waste our money sometimes, from the poorest to the richest. Procrastination is a universal experience, though some are harder hit than others.
Humans do not decide their actions intellectually. They decide emotionally. Their thoughts affect their emotions, and vice versa. But their thought and beliefs do not determine their actions. Much of the time they invent justifications for their actions after the fact. Salesmen and other negotiators spend enormous attention on modeling the emotional reactions of their prey, even more than they spend on modeling their prey’s incentive structures.
All of this applies to politics as well. Informing humans — even when it is possible to do so — often merely provides them with further justifications for their existing belief systems, which (especially for allistic humans) are determined mostly by their social milieu, not by their own attempts to think based on the information they have access to.
If the candidates are corrupt, the government will be corrupt, regardless of which one the voters choose. If the officials, once in office, are confronted by perverse incentive structures in their institutions, even good officials will produce bad government. And Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem places strong limits on how good a voting system can be.
Institutions matter. Voting is not enough. Consultation matters. Expertise matters. Low-quality elites don’t become high-quality elites by competing for votes.
The popular vote is still the most important safeguard against the kinds of disastrous policies that led India to famine after famine under colonial administration, that led the US to commit genocide against the Native Americans, and that kept a substantial fraction of the US’s population in chattel slavery for generations. If Indians, Native Americans, and African Americans, respectively, had had the vote, these things would not have happened, as clearly shown by the end of slavery.
And even the very rotten kind of information that journalism provides at its best can still be valuable when it’s about current events, where no better information is available.
But let’s not mythologize “real journalism” or create unachievable expectations for it.
Posted at https://gist.github.com/anonymous/0d94910bffca58928ed1a2fe219cbd4b