Comment by Terr_
9 days ago
To charitably-interpret the parent-poster, they didn't say that.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
Yeah this is a much better way to say what I was trying to get at.
Yea ok. I do agree with that.
I like to say that the US used to have "the marketplace of ideas" as a goal, but has now become "the cesspool of ideas", which isn't a good thing.
I don't know what the solution to that is, but I don't think lying is going to get us out of it.
Even in a world of perfect transmission, people are highly irrational when faced with ideas challenging their priors. We don’t have perfect transmission, we have, and always have had, systems which elevate attention-drawing, profitable, and easily digestible ideas to the top while filtering out ideas too far from the status quo or threatening to governance. This is almost a matter of nature. How can a news platform exist if it only publishes complicated things beyond the public, what good would that even do? How can it exist if it doesn’t draw attention to its newspapers, or its website. We remove the explicit government control of media but we leave so many back-alleys for influence, and is the government even the locus of power now, or is it the moneyed interests that aren’t even barred from controlling media? And again, even if we woke up tomorrow with perfect, unbiased communication, we haven’t been raised to deal with it. We’d instantly repurpose the platform into a slop-distribution machine and sell advertisements on it and so on.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.