2022-04-26

• There’s this idea that the NY Times is an important, authoritative source of information. What people often don’t appreciate is the extent to which that idea was created as a byproduct of a world lacking abundance of information/other sources. Scarcity of information creates the sense that the source of information is authoritative. The idea that the NY Times (and other legacy media institutions) are broadly authoritative was always an extreme idea. But the extremeness is hard to see in a world where information is scarce. And if the idea takes hold before the scarcity is removed, it can persist for a long time through sheer momentum. But it doesn’t change the fact that the things that change people’s lives (science, technology, religion, philosophy, art) are often either covered in extremely poor quality or simply not covered at all in favor of focusing on some event of passing importance, typically about the executive branch of the US federal government. But if you step back a bit, it’s very obvious that Newton, Einstein, and Darwin are orders of magnitude more important than Bush, Obama, and Trump, and yet the information diet of most NY Times readers would have you conclude the exact opposite. How many NT Times readers could even tell you how Einstein changed our view of how the universe works? The idea that the President’s schedule is more important than who we are and where we are going as a species is bonkers. They could probably give you a light perspective on the importance of Darwin, missing the bigger picture on the ways in which Darwin pops up on a daily basis in extremely deep ways to influence their behavior and the behavior of those around them.
  • These ideas taken almost unchanged from The Revolt of the Public by Gurri
    
• The thing that elites are right about is that most people are too weak/tired to avoid manipulation. Most people are consuming the information equivalent of Doritos chips, rather than steamed brocolli. Folks generally don’t act like they have the stomach for being healthy. So, the elites say, the NY Times may not be a great place to put authority, but it will be better for the masses to treat it as an authority than to turn to Youtube or Reddit, at least on average. Yeah, maybe.

---

---

---