I think it’s helpful to always remember that “governance” is primarily adversarial. It’s only necessary when some individuals and sub-groups don’t actually want to do the things the governing organization is demanding. As such, the motives are completely broken for a governing body to control the majority of press outlets.
The problem is, the motives are broken for ANY entity powerful enough to have a significant voice to control or provide primary information sources. As soon as it’s useful as journalism, it’s even more useful as propaganda and manipulation. This is driven by consumers, with producers following rather than leading the trend—no matter how cynical audiences become, they don’t actually make better decisions on how media adjusts their beliefs.
That’s my summary of 21st-century information dissemination: the goodheart cycle increased faster than the consumers could improve their epistemic hygiene, and there’s no way to fix it (short of making smarter humans, aka raising the sanity waterline, which is an even bigger unsolved problem).
This is driven by consumers, with producers following rather than leading the trend
That’s an artifact of how the success of articles is measured. On LessWrong I can’t see my pageviews, so I have no way to goodhart on maximizing page views for my article.
You can easily set up a publically-funded media outlet where you write into the governing documents that no journalist or editor is allowed to view pageview data.
Umm. I presume you have other feedback mechanisms to predict/measure/feel the impact of your writing here. More importantly, I don’t think LW-style writing is likely to be all that critical to public sentiment, and I don’t think it’s a good example of something that would benefit from government funding or oversight.
LessWrong is well funded by donors. It’s not funded by the government but money is spent to create public good. When EA money funds media it has more specific goals than government funding has but it is an example of different goals.
It’s an example of how optimizing for page views isn’t everywhere. GiveWell also doesn’t optimize for page views. They optimize for donations (which also causes problem if you listen to Ben Hoffman).
Buzzfeed used to hire some investigative reporters and did not care about the page views of the resulting articles. They hired those investigative reporters to gain prestige and be seen as more serious.
I see no reason why the EU couldn’t pay journalists to do investigative journalism in Hungary without optimizing for page views.
Part of setting up governance is getting the incentives right and hopefully, the incentives will be different than the incentives of the current outlets.
I think it’s helpful to always remember that “governance” is primarily adversarial. It’s only necessary when some individuals and sub-groups don’t actually want to do the things the governing organization is demanding. As such, the motives are completely broken for a governing body to control the majority of press outlets.
The problem is, the motives are broken for ANY entity powerful enough to have a significant voice to control or provide primary information sources. As soon as it’s useful as journalism, it’s even more useful as propaganda and manipulation. This is driven by consumers, with producers following rather than leading the trend—no matter how cynical audiences become, they don’t actually make better decisions on how media adjusts their beliefs.
That’s my summary of 21st-century information dissemination: the goodheart cycle increased faster than the consumers could improve their epistemic hygiene, and there’s no way to fix it (short of making smarter humans, aka raising the sanity waterline, which is an even bigger unsolved problem).
This is driven by consumers, with producers following rather than leading the trend
That’s an artifact of how the success of articles is measured. On LessWrong I can’t see my pageviews, so I have no way to goodhart on maximizing page views for my article.
You can easily set up a publically-funded media outlet where you write into the governing documents that no journalist or editor is allowed to view pageview data.
Umm. I presume you have other feedback mechanisms to predict/measure/feel the impact of your writing here. More importantly, I don’t think LW-style writing is likely to be all that critical to public sentiment, and I don’t think it’s a good example of something that would benefit from government funding or oversight.
LessWrong is well funded by donors. It’s not funded by the government but money is spent to create public good. When EA money funds media it has more specific goals than government funding has but it is an example of different goals.
It’s an example of how optimizing for page views isn’t everywhere. GiveWell also doesn’t optimize for page views. They optimize for donations (which also causes problem if you listen to Ben Hoffman).
Buzzfeed used to hire some investigative reporters and did not care about the page views of the resulting articles. They hired those investigative reporters to gain prestige and be seen as more serious.
I see no reason why the EU couldn’t pay journalists to do investigative journalism in Hungary without optimizing for page views.
Part of setting up governance is getting the incentives right and hopefully, the incentives will be different than the incentives of the current outlets.