Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Basically, yes, but it's more than that. The natural mechanisms of a marketplace of ideas don't work. The marketplace is a metaphor, but it's a good one. If you build a better, cheaper mouse trap, and bring it to people for whom it's useful, they'll buy it,

https://twitter.com/GDKOpinionator/status/1411149723671666693

(just ask Australians), so the old mouse trap guy goes out of business. The idea of the "market" relies on there being a place, physical or virtual, in which you can compare competing things, and the person trying to sell his wares has to compete against the *actual thing*

his competitor is selling, not some crummy caricature of what he's selling. Customers can carefully examine both items, see the price, speak to other people who've tried them both. The better product, sold at the lower cost, will win;

what's more, prices and shortages function as signals about surfeits and scarcity and allocate resources efficiently and all that. If a product isn't useful, this becomes obvious pretty fast and price signals indicate to people, "Don't make more of this."

In principle, and pretty much until recently, a marketplace of ideas functioned in a way similar enough that we reached naturally for the metaphor: a market. There was, more or less, one marketplace. Most people chose their ideas from people they knew, books, or the media;

and there was a great deal of overlap in what people in a given community saw in their lives. So if someone started insisting that vaccines caused them to become magnetic, there would be tons of people around them to say, "Now hold on there, Son,"

"If they made you magnetic, you'd be pointing to the North Pole." The idea would quickly be driven out by better theories about what might be in those vaccines, and the truly curious would probably traipse off to a library to find out--

whereupon he would discover a body of established, reliable knowledge upon which to base his theory.
So useless ideas die; useful ones rise--and to come up with a useful idea, generally, you need to stand on on the shoulders of giants.

Not inevitably, of course:

Prior to the Internet, we burned witched and believed that Pop Rocks would cause your stomach to explode. But the marketplace of ideas did work, ultimately, to show that those ideas were of poor value and should be removed from the stock of accepted human knowledge.

Of course this still happens now, too. Bad ideas (leave Covid19 patients on their backs) are driven out by better ones (prone them); lots of bad ideas get driven out by good ones, but hospitals are physical places where people quickly see the consequences of ideas, bad or good.

Social media divorces us all from physical reality and the consequences of our ideas. So rather than ensuring our latest bad idea is met with a stern, "Dude, that's your dumbest idea since the time you tried to light the bong by sticking your pecker in the electric socket,"

We immediately find every other freak who shares our bad idea. We're no longer searching a small, trusted network of people whose reliability and sagacity we've learned to assess over a lifetime, nor even a library of thoughts that have all reached the page with *some*,

interregnum between "impulse" and "publication." We're searching a pool of 3.6 billion people about whom we know so little we have trouble distinguishing a real person from a bot.

We swiftly block anyone who's not in favor of our pro-freak idea;

and our rapidly growing pro-freak community seems vast to us, because our minds are still wired up to think, "If 100 people agree with me, why, that's the whole damn village! It's everyone I've ever known!"
Quickly, the algorithm sees we wish only to meet other pro-freakers;

so we see ever more extreme pro-freak videos. And we don't need to do any work for this to happen. You don't have to haul yourself to the library and read whatever not-quite-what-you-were-looking-for but perhaps useful and mind-broadening books they just happen to have:

"Terpsichord Reviled: Anti-Freak Pamphlets During the Reign of Elizabethan I." Or "Basic Freak," the Freak 101 textbook that's been vetted by a panel of Superfreaks and used to teach undergrads how to get their freak on correctly since 1969.

The sheer number of freaks to whom we're now exposed guarantees we'll be able to find a freak bearing credentials that serve as signs that he has *advanced knowledge* about how to get your freak on. So Somewhere in those 3.6 billion people,

There will be at least one the Rt Honourable Dr. Freakenstein Ph.D, M.D. M.Phil D.Phil Esq. who has gone off the trolley, because statistically, a certain number of us in every population, go off the trolley.

but usually, your odds of being exposed to someone with those credentials *and* a bad case of Trolley Separation *and* a Freak Streak were vanishingly small. But now, your odds are 100 percent. The second you tell YouTube that you're on the Freak Train,

you'll be meeting Dr. Freakenstein, because YouTube knows he'll keep your eyeballs on the screen, so they can serve you ads for that T-Ripper Testosterone-Boosting Protein Toilet you've been hankering after.

So there's Dr. Freakenstein, who says, "Of course you're not pointing at the North Pole, Son. That's because there is no North Pole. The earth is flat as an ironing board," while you watch ad after ad for "SQUATZ! Introducing only crapper that'll make you ripped."

--and who are you to argue with Dr. Freakenstein, a *qualified medical Freakologist?* You live online, except when you do your squatz, so you're not connecting the stuff you learn from Dr. Freakenstein to the physical world;

you're not walking over to your little village's hadron collider to see if you get sucked in and stuck to it forever; and you're not encountering a normal distribution of ideas about whether you might. i.e., you're not going to a market where you can see all the other wares,

and hear the pitch for them.
The Internet as we've structured it now functions as the opposite of a market, or at least, "nothing like a market" It's as if you go to the grocery store meaning to buy food for a week, but the second you go to the frozen food section,

it turns into a giant ice cream store. The more of ice cream you put in your cart, the more ice cream you see--row upon row of ice cream, ever-bigger tubs, with free samples, and enough ice cream to feed all of Chicago.
But all the same brand--Peak Freak.

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