[techfeathers]

I watched this debate between Destiny and a centrist influencer and the centrist influencer was really confident in their perspectives, but also said they mostly used heuristics to learn things. There’s nothing wrong with heuristics, but they played this game where Destiny tried to guess the centrist influencers perspectives on things, and came pretty close to all the opinions. And the influencer admitted their heuristics were really shallow.

One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas.

I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”

[proc0]

The people who put the thumbs on the scales are subject to the same bias and relative positioning of their beliefs. Whatever the issue is with the average person sorting through information will also affect the authorities and experts. Maybe not as much, however when it does happen because they have more control it tends to be more impactful.

So in the end it amounts to the same difference, average people will believe wrong things often with little impact, experts will believe wrong things rarely with lots of impact. Additionally, it's not like experts or authorities cannot contribute, they would just be on a more equal footing and would need to do more work than in a situation where there is censorship or control of information.