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Capitalism is a good system because you can populate it with defective humans and it still works better than the alternatives.
Democracy (The Republic) is a good system because you can populate it with selfish and uninformed citizens and often get a good outcome.
Capitalism is a good system because you can populate it with defective humans and it still works better than the alternatives.
Democracy (The Republic) is a good system because you can populate it with selfish and uninformed citizens and often get a good outcome.
Our justice system is good because you can put defective humans into the trial process and still get credible outcomes.
Social Media is the opposite of a good system. When you add flawed humans to social media, things only get worse.
So how could we tweak social media (and the news business) to make it more self-correcting like our better systems?
So how could we tweak social media (and the news business) to make it more self-correcting like our better systems?
For starters, we could agree to call anonymous sources "unreliable sources." That might clarify a few things.
We could agree to ignore claims that are not IN CLOSE PROXIMITY to fact-checks and criticisms. For example, a tweet is good because the counterclaims are right there in the comments. But a 3-hour interview with one expert should be considered entertainment only.
Our justice system has at its guiding principle "innocent until proven guilty." Our news and social media systems need a similar guiding principle, such as "opinions and reports are unreliable until you have seen both sides of the argument."
I don't have all the answers on how to fix our information systems. But I know we don't want to have systems that make everything worse when you populate them with flawed human beings.
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