Monday September 13, 2021; 8:36 AM EDT
- A pundit the other day accurately referred to one of the U.S’s most recent wars as “debased.�� I think that’s also an accurate way to refer to the state of our nation right now. #
- I think the path toward restoring unity and progress in my country runs inevitably through massive improvements in how we collectively synthesize and communicate information. We need a much more trustworthy process for distributing knowledge. #
- The current stage of our pandemic is obviously fueled by poor knowledge transfer. It’s not just the misinformation available online — it’s also the way the drugs industry has indeed corrupted our medical establishment and regulatory system, the history of deception by our elected officials, the history of basic errors by journalists, and the poor quality of medical journalism, including routinely failing to provide context for studies and events. Even if journalists and authorities happen to be right about the vaccine (which for the record they mostly are), the history of being very wrong in other contexts (like opioids) lends credence to bad information. #
- Starting twenty years ago, two successive national hysterias, and a stream of misinformation from authorities, coupled with poor fact checking by journalists, led us into two misguided wars (only one brave politician dared oppose the first). #
- Every election I have been alive for expresses the fundamental dysfunction in this country between poorly communicated truths and misleading or outright false information propagated by the corrupt and unwitting. The reason money plays such a large role in our political process is that truth is so fungible in this country — political ads gain power as trust in various informational institutions (like journalism) erodes, often for good reason. #
- For many years I focused on the journalism industry, because I know first hand it has a huge problem with quality, including accuracy and other nuance, and other elements of trust. It is also poor at clarity, context, and providing information with greater shelf life. #
- But I now see this problem goes beyond any one industry. We are collectively responsible for educating one another, and education is a lifetime thing. That word doesn’t just mean schools. As Philip Greenspun began teaching us in the late 1990s, education is a huge part of what happens on all kinds of websites and other information systems. Journalism, when done well, is education. Ditto Wikipedia, StackOverflow, SeriousEats, and many more entities. #
- In California, where I lived for many years, the government subsidizes continuing education for adults through a strong community college system (and excellent two tier system of four year universities). #
- In other countries, the government owns and funds news media, including public television networks. They even fund political campaigns, while capping or forbidding donations and limiting expenditures. #
- Journalism in this country has, and has long had, a massive quality problem. It is basically run by people too hidebound and insulated to care, even 25+ years into the age of mass internet (they do care even more now about clicks, views, ratings, and selling hard to cancel subscriptions, for better or worse). #
- But this country doesn’t need to rely nearly so much on journalists any longer, just as it doesn’t need to rely so much on tv networks, cable networks, or YouTube. With the right efforts, funding, and focus, this country from the government down can rehabilitate its information system on a huge scale. I point to some possible areas of focus a bit here but this needs everyone’s imagination and effort. It would be very good for this country and is long overdue. #
- PS The work Dave has been doing building and advocating open platforms and formats for many years is going to be an important part any healthy change to our information system, from where I sit, key to all this. (In fact to me this goes without saying, but I should probably say it.)#