Somewhat unrelated but relevant thought: from software engineering experience in large orgs, correction of any issue rarely worth any effort. AI will drive commiting more and more papers with less and less review. The review takes effort, too much in the age of easy generation.
With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.
I'm very confused because there are 2 Andrews, the author in the blog post only states "Andrew", and by the list of Authors the author seems to be Andrew Gelman, but the slug in the first link is "aking", and then there is also Andrew King, lol.
At least your traffic engineers set standards. In Taiwan often the standards come straight from the legislative yuan, aka just vibes laws from people who are driven around in private cars their whole lives.
Don’t worry, we’re getting there. They just started dismantling what they refer to as the “administrative state”, but which largely deferred substantial questions requiring skill and non-partisan judgement to their respective experts. It was never perfect, nor free from partisan and/or economic concerns, but the replacement appears to be self-interested narcissists and sycophants and their personal fiefdoms, with precious little space for competence, logic, or integrity.
It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings.
The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
Are there any factual allegations on that page? All I could find was "the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used", without any elaboration.
I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."
I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).
Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.
I would point out that most products are useless, and either fail or replace other products which weren't any worse. None of which prevented me from cashing my paychecks for the first half of my career when I worked in private industry.
Most scientific research represents about the same amount of improvement over the state of the art as the shitty web app or whatever that you're working on right now. It's not zero, but very few are going to be groundbreaking. And since the rules are that we all have to publish papers[*], the scientific literature (at least in my field, CS) looks less like a carefully curated library of works by geniuses, and more like an Amazon or Etsy marketplace of ideas, where most are crappy.
[* just like software engineers have to write code, even if the product ends up being shitty or ultimately gets canceled]
Neither of us are going to be changing how the system works, so my advice is to deal with it.
> Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:
> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”
I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.
Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.
Observing, measuring, but also repeatability and ground truth.
Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.
I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)
To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.
I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...
I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.
Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
The consequences here don’t seem all that bad, it’s just a silly management fad. By contrast, “Growth in a Time of Debt” from Reinhardt and Rogoff steered multiple national governments into pointless self-destructive and immiserating austerity, despite being equally bunk, and none of the authors ever saw any consequences for that either. You can’t even blame that one on “management science”, it was a straight macroeconomics paper.
There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo.
I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.
Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.
For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc.
But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.
Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.
> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected
This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?
In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.
Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.
Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:
One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.
No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly.
I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc).
Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972...
Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.
Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.
There's this 'criterion of embarrassment' / 'cui bono' sort of standard[0] that really helps judge these things. So many people perform science that seems to always confirm the positions they've held. All the "society is terrible today" people like to quote LendingClub's "70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" without knowing it's LendingClub content marketing. The snail darter guy happened to find a novel species that is endangered and genetically identical to a non-endangered one just in the place where he was trying to get a dam banned. The sustainability guys find that companies that focus on sustainability do better. The diversity guys find that companies that focus on diversity do better. A scientist who gets a grant from Philip Morris finds that cigarettes aren't bad for you.
It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified.
It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit:
> Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest.
...
> Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.
There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe.
I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers.
0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well.
1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV.
3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government
> I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people
This is an interesting thought experiment.
I'd like to think that if such a thing was discovered, we would investigate why this is the case. I'd like to believe that we wouldn't just accept this as some kind of de-facto truth, and start treating Indians as lesser
When was this golden age of western civilization again? like 10 years ago, are you suggesting we were in this golden age? I mean, the paper this link is discussing is from 2014, so I guess it was more like 15 years ago that the golden age sunsetted?
If anything, I think the Internet has made it easier to expose bad science. People like Andrew Gellman and websites like pubpeer have had a huge impact on the practice of the social sciences (psychology especially) just using blogs. In the past he would have been ignored. Journals and authors do their best to ignore, dismiss, and discredit him now. Having a direct voice to the public is what saves him.
That would be strange and misguided because I didn't talk about a consensus, I was talking about a mechanism for consensus. And consensus has existed many times on many issues now, and then.
Sorry for being flippant. My analysis is that the mix of reason or emotions is unchanged over time. Take the case of this management science paper. What is irrational about defending a bad paper you wrote when it brings you all the accolades and benefits Andrew has described? The authors' personal goals aren't aligned with the public's goals of getting good science. That's not a failure of reason. Maybe it's selfish. That's different.
- The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)
- Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings)
- Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right".
Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.
>The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)
I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out.
Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete.
The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.
But I wouldn't exactly call "professionals trying to make high brow media" exclusive alternative to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok.
A lot of the propaganda (and sane washing) is coming from mass media, too. I feel like the only "legit" media outlets are like Reuters, AP, and some international ones, I guess.
I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
It's not that outrage or unfounded opinions were new, or the masses were never fooled or taken advantage of before. It's that the mechanism for social consensus is rapidly shifting.
> I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
And yet the consensus about climate change and in particular support for policies that address it is very strong.
60-70% is far far higher than most politicians win elections by. They'll call 5low-something% a landslide. They push policies and laws that are far less popular than that, claiming popular mandate.
And yet there are a bunch of people fixated on the idea that it is a disadvantaged (poorer, less educated) minority of average citizens of the country who are orchestrating some evil battle against it. Rather than seeing the obvious that the ruling class is as always pushing divide and conquer techniques, shifting blame, and turning people on one another. A good example of the emotional mechanism of social consensus.
60-70% for a politician or political position is high. For believing in reality it's low.
If you asked "Do cigarettes contribute to lung cancer", you'd expect 95%+. Our evidence for climate change is on-par with that, and yet the rich have run a wildly successful campaign to cast doubt on it for years.
If people really appreciated the gravity of it, we would not have trump, a demonstrably anti-climate president who has rolled back green policies and
slowed decarbonization, and even ran on it.
Apparently spiting the "other side" is more important than our planet's long term habitability.
We used to burn women to death because they were accused of being witches. I don't think this was because there was a lot of reason and evidence when they were doing this.
I don't think it's unique to the people of today that people in groups do dumb emotional shit. That's kind of the point of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger".
With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
> The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]
Many such cases of this, it seems.
It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings.
The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151
(2 months ago, 374 comments)
Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.
Most scientific research represents about the same amount of improvement over the state of the art as the shitty web app or whatever that you're working on right now. It's not zero, but very few are going to be groundbreaking. And since the rules are that we all have to publish papers[*], the scientific literature (at least in my field, CS) looks less like a carefully curated library of works by geniuses, and more like an Amazon or Etsy marketplace of ideas, where most are crappy.
[* just like software engineers have to write code, even if the product ends up being shitty or ultimately gets canceled]
Neither of us are going to be changing how the system works, so my advice is to deal with it.
I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:
> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”
I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.
Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.
Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.
I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)
To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.
Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.
[1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
I'm sure it benefitted some people.
But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.
This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?
In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.
Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.
Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:
One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.
[0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...
I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
This isnt a new thing though.
Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression.
David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this.
Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc).
Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972...
Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.
Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.
It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified.
It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit:
> Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest.
...
> Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.
There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe.
I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers.
0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well.
1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV.
2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm
3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government
This is an interesting thought experiment.
I'd like to think that if such a thing was discovered, we would investigate why this is the case. I'd like to believe that we wouldn't just accept this as some kind of de-facto truth, and start treating Indians as lesser
I'm an idealist I guess though
(if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)
If there was a time, it surely wasn't the time of pregnant men, math is racist, and acronyms are White supremacy culture.
- The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)
- Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings)
- Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right".
Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.
I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out.
Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete.
The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.
But I wouldn't exactly call "professionals trying to make high brow media" exclusive alternative to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok.
A lot of the propaganda (and sane washing) is coming from mass media, too. I feel like the only "legit" media outlets are like Reuters, AP, and some international ones, I guess.
I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
It's not that outrage or unfounded opinions were new, or the masses were never fooled or taken advantage of before. It's that the mechanism for social consensus is rapidly shifting.
> I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
And yet the consensus about climate change and in particular support for policies that address it is very strong.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
60-70% is far far higher than most politicians win elections by. They'll call 5low-something% a landslide. They push policies and laws that are far less popular than that, claiming popular mandate.
And yet there are a bunch of people fixated on the idea that it is a disadvantaged (poorer, less educated) minority of average citizens of the country who are orchestrating some evil battle against it. Rather than seeing the obvious that the ruling class is as always pushing divide and conquer techniques, shifting blame, and turning people on one another. A good example of the emotional mechanism of social consensus.
If you asked "Do cigarettes contribute to lung cancer", you'd expect 95%+. Our evidence for climate change is on-par with that, and yet the rich have run a wildly successful campaign to cast doubt on it for years.
If people really appreciated the gravity of it, we would not have trump, a demonstrably anti-climate president who has rolled back green policies and slowed decarbonization, and even ran on it. Apparently spiting the "other side" is more important than our planet's long term habitability.
I don't think it's unique to the people of today that people in groups do dumb emotional shit. That's kind of the point of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger".