Egregoros

@RustyCrab the market/distributed solution is the old boomer idea that more trustworthy sources will be elevated by the rational choice of the market, but that doesn't really work out in practice because many people prefer bias-strengthening over bias-challenging, which means the market can't really make a rational decision here because people are not rational about it in aggregate

the supply-side solution is regulation, but that's subject to corruption as well for similar reasons to the above

the only other solution is the moral one, which requires moral homogeneity (or at least an overwhelming supermajority). That either takes a period of brutal strife, a protracted national conversion, or something miraculous

I opt for the third one, personally, accepting the long time-frame as a given

@RustyCrab despite my misgivings with journalists influencers are far worse. Journalists have at least corporate structures and decades of court precedent to somewhat mitigate issues. Grifter accounts are entirely economically dependent on access to sources before journalists to beat them.

The whole freaking of legacy media vs online media was just pure slopulism. Something like the Tim pool Russian payment scandal or the Democrat dark money influencer thing is so much worse then most journalist controversies.

This narrowly applies to politics btw in the new media and tech worlds it’s all just access journalism slop.

@RustyCrab this is why I say it's got to be the moral solution. Any extrinsic rewards that attempt to incentivize it will be gamed by people who lie for their own benefit. It has to be an internal, intrinsic desire for truth that stops a person from lying, and because that only stops that one person (not everyone else around him), it has to be that the internal desire is shared in common among all (or at least almost all) of the people. In a society like that, people who are found to have lied or cheated are essentially persona-non-grata

@RustyCrab In modern era the most "accurate" way of procuring information and forming opinions, is something akin to bisection method - you take two shills from opposite sides, and pick the middle ground, then you get another two shills and iterate over and over. It's even more robust, if you have somewhat intermediate understanding of history, so you can support the new information with "extrapolation" of past truths and reject obvious outliers, basically if X happened, the more likely outcome that you observe now is Y, rather than Z.
Is there something you can do about it? Honestly, no, even some kind of vigilantims won't do. Major news outlets are completely compromised, while WWW is apparently converging to that cyberpunk future, where AI/bots will pollute the information and discourse to the point where it's worthless, inorganic gibberish. I living in post-information era.

@binkle @RustyCrab news media is basically worthless, which is why it’s shifted into entertainment, and as a schelling point for political tribes to gather around and organize. Objectivity and integrity without some kind of verification that hurts if they’re wrong is a meaningless idea. Journalism may not even be a verifiable field, since they’re the primary source in a lot of instances. Maybe something like peer-review, but that’s just spreading the problem out. Probably best to just avoid it entirely.