How come the explanations offered for declining trust in media never seem to include the media demonstrably, provably getting things wrong in a way that logically ought to weaken trust?
kelseyfrog · 1h ago
America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that.
Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it.
Phase One: 1770s
The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required.
Phase Two: 1820s–1830s
Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch.
Phase Three: Mid-20th Century
Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom.
Phase Four: 2000s
Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes.
Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
carlosjobim · 24m ago
> solve the class problem
But is it solvable? What if the desire to have somebody else to blame is stronger than any desire for freedom and equality? You want freedom, I want freedom, but does the average man want freedom if it is truly offered him?
msgodel · 58m ago
All societies have elites, you can't eliminate that. What you want are societies where the elite's interests and the people's interests are aligned.
EDIT: meh. At least aristocracies typically had a connection with the people and tended to not openly attack them or their culture.
kelseyfrog · 52m ago
So you have chosen aristocracy. The average inter-aristocracy interval is 417 years +/- 196. See you again in approximately the mid 25th century give or take a few.
thrance · 30m ago
Classes are defined by their differing and opposing interests. By definition then, there can be no alignment between them. Capital owners want more labor for less capital, workers want more capital for less labor.
walterbell · 2h ago
Author is Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about
> Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
No comments yet
bee_rider · 1h ago
I dunno.
Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.
bongodongobob · 58m ago
It's a feedback loop that legitimizes dumbness. 40 years ago, the area 51 guy got laughed at in the bar and he stopped talking about it. Now they can all find each other and jerk each other off.
BlackjackCF · 48m ago
That and grifters now have a megaphone to take advantage of said dumbasses.
ants_everywhere · 1h ago
I see a lot of intelligent people underestimating the impact of things like propaganda and advertising.
The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically.
Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era.
I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results.
If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China.
Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you
kridsdale1 · 40m ago
People who doubt the impact of propaganda need to explain how Google and Facebook bring in a hundred billion in revenue cash each quarter.
carlosjobim · 9m ago
I'll make an attempt to explain it:
Advertising on TV cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires great effort, magazines and billboards a bit less on both fronts. But advertising on social media costs as little as you want, and these platforms are constantly asking business owners to throw in $20 or $50 to advertise. And when the business owner does so, Meta will give them completely fake statistics of how 40 000 people saw their ad. What does it matter that nobody clicked the ad and nobody purchased the product? Meta says right here that the ad was very effective. People love to gamble, and Facebook ads are nothing but a form of gambling for (usually small) business owners. "Sales have been slow this month, what if..." And since the barrier to spending on ads is so low, millions of people will take the bait. Add in the factor that advertisers can choose from hundreds of parameters to target the ads, and they feel like it's a skill they can train to win - hey it's just like sports betting!
Or somebody with a business or an executive has hired their niece to take care of "social media presence" for the company. Of course she is going to say that the ads she is buying on Meta are working great. Her job depends on it! Dito for outsourcing this to a third party that takes care of social media advertising. Of course they're going to give you phony presentations on how well their ads are working.
So it's not that the ads are working. It's a simple casino, and ad purchasers are the suckers.
Except for the 50%+ ads on Instagram which are outright scams and frauds. They probably bring in a lot of money to the advertisers.
msgodel · 1h ago
The last company I worked at gave us all macbooks. I noticed every few days it put an article titled something like "maybe its your parents holding you back" in the sidebar. This seems to be the default configuration on OSX. I'm surprised anyone tolerates this, if I found something like that in my house on my own equipment it would go strait in the trash.
nativeit · 1h ago
To quote an oversimplified campaign trope: “It’s the [horrifyingly lopsided unequal] economy stupid.”
wizardforhire · 59m ago
“used to be you had to impress people to get people to watch your show… But now, all you have to do is impress the algorith. …all hail the algorithm.”
-Superfastmatt
jsrozner · 1h ago
Ugh, this fellow misses the forest for the trees. Though he's partially right: social media is partially an extension of past trends. See, e.g., "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Postman.
But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.
Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)
Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.
So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.
Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.
America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.
Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.
This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
skulk · 1h ago
> Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences
Maybe if there was a social safety net, people would feel more comfortable choosing options that pay less. My soul has a pretty low price since I value security over abstract morality.
jsrozner · 1h ago
Sure, agreed there are lots of causal factors and ways we could effect positive change.
My main objective is not to critique that decision, but rather to argue that a society dedicated to the pursuit of dollars is likely to find itself epistemically astray
gausswho · 27m ago
I re-read Amusing Ourselves to Death last year and I found it surprisingly apt for what the Internet represented in 2024. Most cultures haven't come to grips with what it's become. Apart from some hangers-on from the old days, all the attention gazes on all the junkiest places.
It didn't look well upon someone to be a 'couch potato' in the 1980's. Excessive television watchers were ostracized. We haven't hit that point yet with the Internet, but it feels like a future generation may yet plant a cultural flagpole to make it happen.
Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it.
Phase One: 1770s
The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required.
Phase Two: 1820s–1830s
Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch.
Phase Three: Mid-20th Century
Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom.
Phase Four: 2000s
Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes.
Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
But is it solvable? What if the desire to have somebody else to blame is stronger than any desire for freedom and equality? You want freedom, I want freedom, but does the average man want freedom if it is truly offered him?
EDIT: meh. At least aristocracies typically had a connection with the people and tended to not openly attack them or their culture.
> Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
No comments yet
Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.
The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically.
Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era.
I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results.
If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China.
Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you
Advertising on TV cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires great effort, magazines and billboards a bit less on both fronts. But advertising on social media costs as little as you want, and these platforms are constantly asking business owners to throw in $20 or $50 to advertise. And when the business owner does so, Meta will give them completely fake statistics of how 40 000 people saw their ad. What does it matter that nobody clicked the ad and nobody purchased the product? Meta says right here that the ad was very effective. People love to gamble, and Facebook ads are nothing but a form of gambling for (usually small) business owners. "Sales have been slow this month, what if..." And since the barrier to spending on ads is so low, millions of people will take the bait. Add in the factor that advertisers can choose from hundreds of parameters to target the ads, and they feel like it's a skill they can train to win - hey it's just like sports betting!
Or somebody with a business or an executive has hired their niece to take care of "social media presence" for the company. Of course she is going to say that the ads she is buying on Meta are working great. Her job depends on it! Dito for outsourcing this to a third party that takes care of social media advertising. Of course they're going to give you phony presentations on how well their ads are working.
So it's not that the ads are working. It's a simple casino, and ad purchasers are the suckers.
Except for the 50%+ ads on Instagram which are outright scams and frauds. They probably bring in a lot of money to the advertisers.
-Superfastmatt
But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.
Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)
Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.
So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.
Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.
America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.
Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.
This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
Maybe if there was a social safety net, people would feel more comfortable choosing options that pay less. My soul has a pretty low price since I value security over abstract morality.
My main objective is not to critique that decision, but rather to argue that a society dedicated to the pursuit of dollars is likely to find itself epistemically astray
It didn't look well upon someone to be a 'couch potato' in the 1980's. Excessive television watchers were ostracized. We haven't hit that point yet with the Internet, but it feels like a future generation may yet plant a cultural flagpole to make it happen.