I think epistemology is more complicated than 'mostly social' or 'mostly individual' – I don't think it's possible to have a valid or useful 'social epistemology' without a valid and useful 'individual epistemology'.
I think, if anything, a lot of the problems you describe are due to people overly weighing 'social epistemology', e.g. 'I'm part of the reality-based community thus my communities beliefs are obviously correct'.
"Rauch believes that mainstream journalists in general try to report the news, and it is primarily in social media that we see lies and distortions."
There's no longer any clear distinction between the two. Most mainstream journalists are on and off Twitter all day, plus they have Slack channels that they bloviate with colleagues on, etc. The result is that I think journalists are hesitant to write stuff that goes against their audience's preferred narrative or interpretive framework, even if they were inclined to, because they don't want to face the barrage of criticism in their various social media feeds that would result.
It's worth asking whether technology is playing a different negative role here, also. To draw a parallel: many sports fans will tell you that things like Statcast have hurt the entertainment value of Major League Baseball by making every aspect of the game measurable and quantifiable, and thus constructing a successful team simply becomes an optimization problem, so now everybody is trying to execute the same strategy in pretty much every phase of the game. By that same token, in these days when pageviews and clicks and shares and retweets and so forth are easily tracked and quantifiable, it is much easier for editors and publishers now to tell which stories are driving engagement with readers and thus generating ad revenues, and the human mind being what it is, a lot of these viral stories are ragebait stuff that tells us our political opponents are evil, terrible, rotten people, which by extension also tells us that we are good and virtuous and wonderful people by way of opposing them, thus giving readers a psychological or emotional boost. The downsides of this for public discourse are obvious.
A pessimistic view of the odds of returning to the values of the 20th Century, no less the liberal values of the Age of Enlightenment that form the foundation of our Constitution and the Scientific Method. I hope Arnold is wrong, but fear he is right, and put a higher probability on the latter.
"They wanted the NYT to relentlessly crusade against Mr. Trump, even if not all of the accusations against him were merited."
Valid criticism, but it seems more about emphasis and tone than object level accuracy. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the claim. And emphasis and tone are epistemically important. But the NYT standards seem much more amenable to common norms and to correction than do those of Trump or other practitioners of trolling and canceling.
I think epistemology is more complicated than 'mostly social' or 'mostly individual' – I don't think it's possible to have a valid or useful 'social epistemology' without a valid and useful 'individual epistemology'.
I think, if anything, a lot of the problems you describe are due to people overly weighing 'social epistemology', e.g. 'I'm part of the reality-based community thus my communities beliefs are obviously correct'.
"Rauch believes that mainstream journalists in general try to report the news, and it is primarily in social media that we see lies and distortions."
There's no longer any clear distinction between the two. Most mainstream journalists are on and off Twitter all day, plus they have Slack channels that they bloviate with colleagues on, etc. The result is that I think journalists are hesitant to write stuff that goes against their audience's preferred narrative or interpretive framework, even if they were inclined to, because they don't want to face the barrage of criticism in their various social media feeds that would result.
It's worth asking whether technology is playing a different negative role here, also. To draw a parallel: many sports fans will tell you that things like Statcast have hurt the entertainment value of Major League Baseball by making every aspect of the game measurable and quantifiable, and thus constructing a successful team simply becomes an optimization problem, so now everybody is trying to execute the same strategy in pretty much every phase of the game. By that same token, in these days when pageviews and clicks and shares and retweets and so forth are easily tracked and quantifiable, it is much easier for editors and publishers now to tell which stories are driving engagement with readers and thus generating ad revenues, and the human mind being what it is, a lot of these viral stories are ragebait stuff that tells us our political opponents are evil, terrible, rotten people, which by extension also tells us that we are good and virtuous and wonderful people by way of opposing them, thus giving readers a psychological or emotional boost. The downsides of this for public discourse are obvious.
As an aside, I wrote my senior thesis on Peirce's concept of fallibilism & Popper's falsification principle
Did you put a PDF version available on the web anywhere?
no; that was 35 years ago. no digital copy & I have no idea where the hard copy is.
Would it be okay to write a short article on how you drafted the doc? Popper sounded interesting.
Fiits with my experience. I'm taking another look at the Fantasy Teams project.
A pessimistic view of the odds of returning to the values of the 20th Century, no less the liberal values of the Age of Enlightenment that form the foundation of our Constitution and the Scientific Method. I hope Arnold is wrong, but fear he is right, and put a higher probability on the latter.
"They wanted the NYT to relentlessly crusade against Mr. Trump, even if not all of the accusations against him were merited."
Valid criticism, but it seems more about emphasis and tone than object level accuracy. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the claim. And emphasis and tone are epistemically important. But the NYT standards seem much more amenable to common norms and to correction than do those of Trump or other practitioners of trolling and canceling.
Fiits with my experience. I'm taking another look at the Fantasy Teams project.
Fiits with my experience. I'm taking another look at the Fantasy Teams project.