[glyph]

This is why consensus is a collection. Sometimes dialectical analysis is good; thesis, antithesis, synthesis is a tried and true formula that often works. But not always! Sometimes one side is just horseshit that gets mindlessly repeated in the interest of “balance”. In either case I’m not suggesting that the consensus ruthlessly censor dissenting views, rather that in order to make sense out of dissenting views, the strongest forms of each argument need to be presented together alongside accountability: editorial moderation and fact-checking.

Even in the cases where the truth really is somewhere in the middle between two opposing camps, reading a sequence of side A #1, side B #1, side A #2, side B #2, in disconnected stories gives you a very skewed view subject to recency bias. For example you can’t easily check the history to see if a claim B is making in their second story was already debunked by A in their first one, and it’s a huge waste of time and energy for A to have to spend all their media budget just refuting that claim over and over because B keeps bringing it up every time there’s no fact checker right in front of them to call them on it (and even sometimes if there is).

In other words the current media environment rewards being loud, wrong, simple and repetitive far over and above even the normal human bias for such things. It reinforces our worst cognitive habits.