People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is. Many intellectual subcultures have published pamphlets with contents that the in-group finds very convincing, yet they generally always end up ignored.
What would the newspaper be doing differently compared to the things that came before?
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is.
I’m not sure. People in 1900 or 1950 had less knowledge than we do now, but they might have had a mainstream culture that took the knowledge they had more seriously than ours does. I’d have to be more of a historian to be able to tell how much this was actually the case.
How well does having Jaynes, Kahneman & Tversky, and The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences measure up to creationism as a political platform, blank-slate leftism and postmodernism in academia, or climate denial and anti-vaccinationists getting massive media attention?
EDIT: My mental model of Robin Hanson also notes that all else being equal, you might expect people with less surplus resources to have a higher sanity waterline, since they have a smaller margin for engaging in delusional signaling before they start running out of vital resources like food.
You could always do a veil of ignorance style thought experiment and ask how crazy you would expect things to be for you if you were a person chosen at random at a given time and place to try to sum over some of the contexts.
Should differences in agency be accounted for somehow? If there’s a single god-emperor somehow able to order absolutely everyone around in minute detail, should you consider only the sanity of the god-emperor, or also of everyone else, when all they can do is obey the god-emperor? The lives of the populace are going to suck, but will be actively crazy only if the god-emperor orders them to do stuff that results in craziness. One idea of the past is that there was more overt control by some sort of small social elite caste and the general populace had less individual decision-making ability then.
We probably think about different specific examples, so I will describe the ones I have seen.
Most of free papers I get contain advertising. Pictures of products, and prices. In most cases, nothing else. In some cases, a few short boring stories are included. I think that the goal here is to sell as much stuff as possible, and the publishers probably discovered that a legible content, beyond some bare minimum, does not really help sell more.
Then I get a free newspaper from our house caretaker. In this case the goal is to provide us some basic house-related info, and to remind us about how lucky we are to have this specific caretaker. This is the nearest example to free newspaper education I have seen, but it is extremely limited in scope.
Sometimes I get a municipal newspaper (usually when the municipal election is near), which provides some info about what happenned around us (culture, construction, problems) and gently reminds us about how much our municipal representatives did for us and why we should vote for them again.
At university I have seen some free newspaper for students, rather boring. My suspicion was that it was just a pretext to get some government funding, put money in editors’ pockets, and generate some output with random content. Anyway, it was supposed to be about fun and opportunities (such as travelling), not education.
None of these had general education as a goal. And those are the only examples of free newspapers I have seen repeatedly. -- But the situation may be different in other places.
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century
I guess it is just a century or two that enough people are literate. And newspapers were considered powerful and dangerous; this is why censorship existed. (Though it does not prove that newspapers are efficient in education, specifically.)
The education of general population is typically done in schools. I think it works rather well… depending on what you compare it with. Compared with situation centuries ago, people can read and write, do some simple math, don’t believe in witches, etc. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Perhaps the schools could be more efficient (that is a separate discussion I would love to have once, but not now). But the side effect of free mandatory general education is that it stopped being a status symbol. And it’s usually boring. The newspaper could avoid some of that boredom, because people would read it voluntarily and individually; and the articles would not be followed by exams.
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is. Many intellectual subcultures have published pamphlets with contents that the in-group finds very convincing, yet they generally always end up ignored.
What would the newspaper be doing differently compared to the things that came before?
Is it as low as it was?
I’m not sure. People in 1900 or 1950 had less knowledge than we do now, but they might have had a mainstream culture that took the knowledge they had more seriously than ours does. I’d have to be more of a historian to be able to tell how much this was actually the case.
How well does having Jaynes, Kahneman & Tversky, and The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences measure up to creationism as a political platform, blank-slate leftism and postmodernism in academia, or climate denial and anti-vaccinationists getting massive media attention?
EDIT: My mental model of Robin Hanson also notes that all else being equal, you might expect people with less surplus resources to have a higher sanity waterline, since they have a smaller margin for engaging in delusional signaling before they start running out of vital resources like food.
I also think it’s inaccurate to say there’s A sanity waterline as opposed to different waterlines in different contexts.
You could always do a veil of ignorance style thought experiment and ask how crazy you would expect things to be for you if you were a person chosen at random at a given time and place to try to sum over some of the contexts.
Should differences in agency be accounted for somehow? If there’s a single god-emperor somehow able to order absolutely everyone around in minute detail, should you consider only the sanity of the god-emperor, or also of everyone else, when all they can do is obey the god-emperor? The lives of the populace are going to suck, but will be actively crazy only if the god-emperor orders them to do stuff that results in craziness. One idea of the past is that there was more overt control by some sort of small social elite caste and the general populace had less individual decision-making ability then.
We probably think about different specific examples, so I will describe the ones I have seen.
Most of free papers I get contain advertising. Pictures of products, and prices. In most cases, nothing else. In some cases, a few short boring stories are included. I think that the goal here is to sell as much stuff as possible, and the publishers probably discovered that a legible content, beyond some bare minimum, does not really help sell more.
Then I get a free newspaper from our house caretaker. In this case the goal is to provide us some basic house-related info, and to remind us about how lucky we are to have this specific caretaker. This is the nearest example to free newspaper education I have seen, but it is extremely limited in scope.
Sometimes I get a municipal newspaper (usually when the municipal election is near), which provides some info about what happenned around us (culture, construction, problems) and gently reminds us about how much our municipal representatives did for us and why we should vote for them again.
At university I have seen some free newspaper for students, rather boring. My suspicion was that it was just a pretext to get some government funding, put money in editors’ pockets, and generate some output with random content. Anyway, it was supposed to be about fun and opportunities (such as travelling), not education.
None of these had general education as a goal. And those are the only examples of free newspapers I have seen repeatedly. -- But the situation may be different in other places.
I guess it is just a century or two that enough people are literate. And newspapers were considered powerful and dangerous; this is why censorship existed. (Though it does not prove that newspapers are efficient in education, specifically.)
The education of general population is typically done in schools. I think it works rather well… depending on what you compare it with. Compared with situation centuries ago, people can read and write, do some simple math, don’t believe in witches, etc. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Perhaps the schools could be more efficient (that is a separate discussion I would love to have once, but not now). But the side effect of free mandatory general education is that it stopped being a status symbol. And it’s usually boring. The newspaper could avoid some of that boredom, because people would read it voluntarily and individually; and the articles would not be followed by exams.