Indeed, why trust any experts on anything? We should do the legwork, all of it, for every decision we make. Vaccines? I want to see it kill a polio and then not make an autism. The earth? Sure looks flat to me. Can you prove it's round? Then show me how to do it, so I can prove it to myself? Taking other people's word for it is just censoring alternative points of view. This is America. I don't want anything to do with censorship.
Newsguard is a technology meant to control what people see, read, and ultimately think. If you don’t immediately see the dangers of that type of technology then I’m not sure what will convince you otherwise.
NewsGuar doesn't block any content. It provides ratings of news sites. How does that control what people see, read, and ultimately think? It doesn't even verify or refute specific stories, just overall publication credibility.
It's also not really technology. It's a bunch of journalists doing ratings. Technology is just how they disseminate the ratings, but a lot different (and more accountable) than some kind of AI that tries to do this.
> Newsguard is a technology meant to control what people see, read, and ultimately think. If you don’t immediately see the dangers of that type of technology then I’m not sure what will convince you otherwise.
The problems aren't all one one side. There are problems with having technology like Newsguard, and there are problem with not having technology like it. Just today, I came across the phenomenon of partisan propaganda masquerading as local journalism (https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/03/04/activists-setup-local...).
I've never used Newsguard, but I really hope it flags stuff like "The Tennessee Star." It'd be a clue to question the source more, and God knows we need more clues to get through our hurried, overloaded lives.
That is exactly what antivax people say about vaccination campaigns.
I'm not saying you should trust NewsGuard. I don't know much about them! But the categorical alarm you take to the entire concept of independent news vetting is problematic.
We aren't talking about objective empirical science. We are talking about partial, subjective and biased media.
NewsGuard was created by media insiders with funding from media insider foundations. There is most definitely cause for worry there. Would you say china's media "experts" should control what the chinese citizens see? Would you say the same about russia, europe or anywhere in the world?
Blind appeal to authority is just as bad as blindly ignoring authority. I'm not saying I have the answers here. I don't know what the solution is. But I'm certain either extreme is bad for society.
The argument I responded to, as I read it, is that you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true. I don't so much care about NewsGuard --- I don't use it --- but we delegate all kinds of judgements, many more important than this one --- to experts, for good reason.
Maybe we should just directly delegate voting to experts? Or are you saying that you can't trust any organization to evaluate political candidates and programs? That can't be true. We delegate all kinds of judgements, many more important than voting to experts, for good reason.
In what way is it a sleight of hand? I'd argue that most people delegate almost the entirety of their voting decision to some external authority, in almost exactly the same way as they'd sign up for and use a service like NewsGuard.
The question isn't whether we should delegate. We make bad decisions when we don't. The question is who we should delegate it to. Anyone who told you to vote for Trump was a bad source.
Maybe we need more delegation experts? Recursively? ;)
Anyway, you originally wrote:
> you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true.
But it can.
Successful delegation requires alignment of incentives, oversight or some (well founded) trust relationship. Otherwise, if the stakes are high enough (and if you get to shape the voting or news-consumption and non-consumption of a sizeable fraction of people, they are) bad things will happen to those who are willing delegate, in aggregate.
What makes the expert more trustworthy than the politician or news-source itself? Why would you be better at picking one than the other? Credentials? Max Boot is one of the “world's leading authorities on armed conflict” and well-credentialed (academically and organizationally). Do you trust him? Did the American Tax Payers get a good return of investment of following his expertise laid out in “The Case for American Empire” to the tune of a few trillion Dollars?
Tucker Carlson says no, we shouldn't trust Max Boot. Should we trust him instead? Why not?
The answer is that you can only delegate these things to the extent you're able and willing to critically evaluate the quality and basis of the advice (since you have no mechanism to align incentives). And I'd be shocked if you could come up with a single broadly trustworthy news source evaluation organization -- I am not aware of one, are you? Assuming there is one, how would it stay that way longer term?
I don't understand your argument. Obviously, if you refuse to delegate any decision you make to experts, you will make worse decisions. If evaluating news media isn't your full-time job, you will do a poorer job of it than someone who was trained to do it and has years of experience and context to do it with.
You seem to be under the weird impression that I'm saying all experts are trustworthy. No, obviously not. I don't trust Max Boot (I trust Tucker Carlson far less). I'm selective about who I delegate parts of my decisionmaking to, and you should be too.
Again: the point isn't that NewsGuard is good (I have no idea if it is). The point is that the very concept of NewsGuard doesn't offend reason or civic virtue.
I'm wondering if we're talking past each other because each of us has a different idea what "delegating" means in this discussion. I'm not against consulting various "fact checking" services to help inform my opinion and help uncover pointers to relevant evidence I can follow up on my own if I wish to. I would however neither trust their impartiality, nor believe that they have some inherent magical expertise that would make them vastly better at those evaluations than me (in both cases: what would the selection function for this look like and why wouldn't it equally apply to news in the first place? News sources don't thrive by giving their readers hard to swallow, non-partisan facts and evaluation – they are inherently tribal).
But "delegating" to me means completely offloading some task to a third party, even if it's one you've vetted before and maybe periodically check on.
To me, delegation in this sense for what news sources I expose myself to offends both reason and civic virtue.
I don't believe in the existence of particularly trustworthy new sources with broad coverage. That such trust is misplaced is easy to verify by picking a few particular examples where you can dig in a bit yourself. Therefore one should be able to get useful information from people one disagrees with or even believes to be evil or dishonest, as long as they're at least periodically willing to make cogent, evidence based arguments. I can despise Tucker Carlson and still agree with him on his evaluation of Max Boot, by looking up the evidence he presents and validating if it supports his claims. Same with Chomsky, Engelhardt etc.
