There’s an underlying issue here that there’s little incentive in most domains to convey truth or the best attempt at truth, culturally and societally, at least in my opinion.
On the consumer side, people want entertainment and interesting. Much of reality and its corners are interesting but there’s often a high barrier of entry in terms of prior knowledge and absorptive capacity overall to find the interesting bits and probe them. As such, information has to be conveyed to a general audience’s ability to understand things and often the nuanced interesting bits are lost. Many things just aren’t spectacularly interesting on a daily basis to any life changing degree.
Even outside the general audience, even science struggles with incentive for truth. Much research published these days is targeted around publishing papers and maintaining certain metrics to be considered relevant and drive future work (their livelihood). Science is a long twisted road with many failures and we don’t make it practical to travel. So people come up with incremental often very weak publications just to put food on the table. Occasionally a few go beyond publishing semi-useful to nearly useless results and go out and forge data or manipulate methodology in ways to achieve certain conclusions. It happens all the time. Combine that with the ever growing reproducibility crisis and while I give certain publication platforms more credit than a documentary, I certainly don’t put most as useful or in many cases even that credible. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just the way things are in our institutions.
And with the internet we have a platform for anyone to spew anything they want as truth. We have people who have a lot of incentives to put misinformation out there to their benefit. Businesses and their marketing/propaganda arms are at the forefront. Governments around the world do it. And now we have automated and widely available technology to produce all sorts of somewhat believable information.
These issues have always existed in our society of free speech but competition and economic incentives are becoming clearer for many in the value of lying over truth telling or at least attempts at truth telling. There’s just so much value to be had in manipulating information out there.
Now there’s still value in understanding or trying to understand truth. If you understand things you have a competitive advantage, but you also tend to have more advantage if you exclusively understand truth, so teaching others how to distinguish nonsense or presenting them with truths you discover is often putting oneself at a competitive disadvantage. So the more we pressure people and normalize and accept these pressures everywhere, we shouldn’t be surprised to see complete and utter trash information everywhere we look. And it’s only going to get worse.
On the consumer side, people want entertainment and interesting. Much of reality and its corners are interesting but there’s often a high barrier of entry in terms of prior knowledge and absorptive capacity overall to find the interesting bits and probe them. As such, information has to be conveyed to a general audience’s ability to understand things and often the nuanced interesting bits are lost. Many things just aren’t spectacularly interesting on a daily basis to any life changing degree.
Even outside the general audience, even science struggles with incentive for truth. Much research published these days is targeted around publishing papers and maintaining certain metrics to be considered relevant and drive future work (their livelihood). Science is a long twisted road with many failures and we don’t make it practical to travel. So people come up with incremental often very weak publications just to put food on the table. Occasionally a few go beyond publishing semi-useful to nearly useless results and go out and forge data or manipulate methodology in ways to achieve certain conclusions. It happens all the time. Combine that with the ever growing reproducibility crisis and while I give certain publication platforms more credit than a documentary, I certainly don’t put most as useful or in many cases even that credible. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just the way things are in our institutions.
And with the internet we have a platform for anyone to spew anything they want as truth. We have people who have a lot of incentives to put misinformation out there to their benefit. Businesses and their marketing/propaganda arms are at the forefront. Governments around the world do it. And now we have automated and widely available technology to produce all sorts of somewhat believable information.
These issues have always existed in our society of free speech but competition and economic incentives are becoming clearer for many in the value of lying over truth telling or at least attempts at truth telling. There’s just so much value to be had in manipulating information out there.
Now there’s still value in understanding or trying to understand truth. If you understand things you have a competitive advantage, but you also tend to have more advantage if you exclusively understand truth, so teaching others how to distinguish nonsense or presenting them with truths you discover is often putting oneself at a competitive disadvantage. So the more we pressure people and normalize and accept these pressures everywhere, we shouldn’t be surprised to see complete and utter trash information everywhere we look. And it’s only going to get worse.