In the fifteen years I’ve written for public consumption, this is the topic I’ve returned to most. I have argued that people who work in the media are in great majorities unduly concerned with being popular among their peers, and that this desire distorts our newsmedia and what it covers in destructive ways. I also believe that the most important site of this kind of social conditioning is Twitter. A corollary to this is that the industry, which will give the most trivial subjects immense amounts of coverage (like, say, the “Try Guys”) avoids talking about the powerful impact of the desire to be popular, a kind of within-industry omerta that prevents anyone from looking too closely at how the sausage gets made. I told this story my first year of writing, I’ve told it most every year since, and I’m telling it again now. Because nothing ever changes.
Just the usual dopamine centers up to no good in the modern world!....Well said! "The saddest is when someone shares something, receives the mandatory social conditioning, and deletes the tweet in shame. I recognize the ritualistic quality of all of this and so I don’t take it personally...".
So much of this. When I was writing I even had tweets to my work deleted by my publication. Got crossways with the publisher about it. Bottom line: independent thought won’t be promoted, even when seeking it was supposedly the reason the writers were brought on. Media wants the reputation for being original but rewards conformity.
How could Twitter (as this seems to be the focus / reinforcer of this (very old) tendency to want to be on the inside, and to therefore diss anyone (like you) who breaks ranks) - sorry, effusion of parentheses - be modified so as to work in precisely the opposite way? That is to encourage dissent, contrarian views etc not to suppress them. So it's not likes that push you up the scale, but dislikes, for example. "look everyone, here's someone saying something that everyone disagrees with, come and see if you disagree with them too". That's maybe a bit crude, but it seems to me like it would be an improvement over the "let's all follow the crowd" model that prevails now - and look where it has led us.
A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.
And of course, now that Twitter exists everyone must treat everything as a political emergency.
There are only two types of people in this world: me and everyone else.
I think it is a bit simple to understand. Jordan Peterson talks about it... the pursuit of position on the status and dominance hierarchy. It used to be more contained... family, places of work, community. Social media both caused it to be national and global while at the same time corrupted it to be more exclusively about popularity and much less to do about real accomplishment. Just ask yourself... what did the Kardashians really do to earn their millions (and billions)?
The pursuit of social hierarchy status is a ubiquitous human behavior. It is the design of the system that either exploits that for good, or else sends humanity into the sewer.
We either grow self-awareness that we are pursuing our status at the expense of the whole and stop doing the things that lead to such bad outcomes... or we change the system so that our natural needs pursuits are additive to two progress and productive growth.
I think we should do both.
And how we get it started is to call out the selfish pursuits of others causing bad outcomes... take away the fake shine of positive popularity. This is happening. This article is an example.
Related to this... the journalism industry needs professional standards and certification.
The next step is to put the Republicans back in power and hammer them to enact legislation that breaks all the political and Wall Street connections between the tech and media industry, and puts those entities back into being platforms of free exchange and non-biased, balanced reporting.
Somebody gave me some good advice recently. 99% of the time when somebody asks "What do you think of this idea?" they're not genuinely soliciting criticism, they're seeking affirmation. In other words what they expect to hear is everyone in the group saying "That's so true" or "What a great idea" or some variant. In other words it's an exercise in tribalism.
Say that to a bunch of geeks on the other hand and we will take the question at face value and cheerfully tear the proposal apart (or praise it if it's a genuinely good idea). The question is who do you want designing your car seat belt? Or the bulkhead on that passenger jet? Or figuring out if that politician is lying or what the real situation is like overseas?
There are professions that (should) reward stubborn old mules who think that the job is more important than getting along with people.
I think what's probably going on re: this not getting covered is a failure of imagination. I thought you hit upon this in your piece on publishing, these people have to work in this industry and to work, they have to get along. I think most industries that are not subject to some other, external selection pressure conform to this, in the little bit of time I've spent running around LA, its been very clear that popularity is the second most important factor in who gets opportunities for succes (the first still being who your parents are). Asking most journalists to imagine a world where their careers aren't highly staked to how many of their peers follow them on twitter is like asking fish to imagine living in trees. My guess you happen to have had such an anomalous trajectory (coming out of academia, finding early success on the internet, being embraced as a sort of counter-mainstream figurehead in certain circles, being a prolific and decent writer) that you just aren't aware of how pervasive this is, not just in journalism but everywhere. And again, I don't think that its the case that the people who compete in this sphere necessarily wouldn't prefer one that correlates more to say, how good their writing or reporting is, its just that they no longer have a way of imagining how that might look.
since i come out of evolution, i think of the 'iron law of institutions' in a group vs. individual level benefit context. individually this sort of behavior is beneficial and necessary for success. but on a group level it makes the broader unit far weaker and less robust. in normal course of biosocial evolution you develop regulators of ingroup dynamics so they don't become counterproductive and overwhelm group fitness (eg cheater detection mechanisms or hard to fake signals of commitment)
I think a bigger reason than "I buy into it and won't criticize it" is that what looks to me like an obvious race to the bottom in chasing the correct insider opinions just doesn't feel that way to the people involved.
I suspect that the people engaging in this disturbing behavior aren't occasionally realizing that they're jockeying for social status and then denying it. I think they've learned the conformity, the "well since we all know" way of speaking, and conformed, and felt rewarded for it. So they keep doing it.
I think this probably works at a subconscious level. I don't mean that in a Freudian sense but a more literal sense, the way that habits develop without us realizing it, and then the habit just feels like a fact of your reality, which makes it harder to notice and harder to change.
There is good evidence that we are all more likely to believe whatever our tribe says than some conclusion we arrived at on our own.
Once you see this in the journalism industry, you can't unsee it.
I appreciate FDB more than ever. As a conservative, I lost my tribe when I ditched Trump. I looked for intelligent progressive writers and found very few. Most are just in-grouping themselves and virtue signaling. Freddie isn't your prototype progressive, but he does believe in a lot of the causes. And I find his arguments to be thoughtful, and with good intent, even when I disagree. Thank you.
Some of this behavior exists in science now.
Just the usual dopamine centers up to no good in the modern world!....Well said! "The saddest is when someone shares something, receives the mandatory social conditioning, and deletes the tweet in shame. I recognize the ritualistic quality of all of this and so I don’t take it personally...".
So much of this. When I was writing I even had tweets to my work deleted by my publication. Got crossways with the publisher about it. Bottom line: independent thought won’t be promoted, even when seeking it was supposedly the reason the writers were brought on. Media wants the reputation for being original but rewards conformity.
How could Twitter (as this seems to be the focus / reinforcer of this (very old) tendency to want to be on the inside, and to therefore diss anyone (like you) who breaks ranks) - sorry, effusion of parentheses - be modified so as to work in precisely the opposite way? That is to encourage dissent, contrarian views etc not to suppress them. So it's not likes that push you up the scale, but dislikes, for example. "look everyone, here's someone saying something that everyone disagrees with, come and see if you disagree with them too". That's maybe a bit crude, but it seems to me like it would be an improvement over the "let's all follow the crowd" model that prevails now - and look where it has led us.
It was a shame that comments were not permitted on the Parker Molloy convo.
Mark Twain wrote about this back over 100 years ago in 'Corn-pone Opinions' http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
Most relevant passage:
A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.
And of course, now that Twitter exists everyone must treat everything as a political emergency.
This reminds me of a meme:
There are only two types of people in this world: me and everyone else.
I think it is a bit simple to understand. Jordan Peterson talks about it... the pursuit of position on the status and dominance hierarchy. It used to be more contained... family, places of work, community. Social media both caused it to be national and global while at the same time corrupted it to be more exclusively about popularity and much less to do about real accomplishment. Just ask yourself... what did the Kardashians really do to earn their millions (and billions)?
The pursuit of social hierarchy status is a ubiquitous human behavior. It is the design of the system that either exploits that for good, or else sends humanity into the sewer.
We either grow self-awareness that we are pursuing our status at the expense of the whole and stop doing the things that lead to such bad outcomes... or we change the system so that our natural needs pursuits are additive to two progress and productive growth.
I think we should do both.
And how we get it started is to call out the selfish pursuits of others causing bad outcomes... take away the fake shine of positive popularity. This is happening. This article is an example.
Related to this... the journalism industry needs professional standards and certification.
The next step is to put the Republicans back in power and hammer them to enact legislation that breaks all the political and Wall Street connections between the tech and media industry, and puts those entities back into being platforms of free exchange and non-biased, balanced reporting.
perhaps this post should be titled "the rise of the mean-girls of middle school in the PMC"
it's not just journalism tho may be the most advanced in this field... (journalism as a post-blue collar PMC profession that is)
Somebody gave me some good advice recently. 99% of the time when somebody asks "What do you think of this idea?" they're not genuinely soliciting criticism, they're seeking affirmation. In other words what they expect to hear is everyone in the group saying "That's so true" or "What a great idea" or some variant. In other words it's an exercise in tribalism.
Say that to a bunch of geeks on the other hand and we will take the question at face value and cheerfully tear the proposal apart (or praise it if it's a genuinely good idea). The question is who do you want designing your car seat belt? Or the bulkhead on that passenger jet? Or figuring out if that politician is lying or what the real situation is like overseas?
There are professions that (should) reward stubborn old mules who think that the job is more important than getting along with people.
I think what's probably going on re: this not getting covered is a failure of imagination. I thought you hit upon this in your piece on publishing, these people have to work in this industry and to work, they have to get along. I think most industries that are not subject to some other, external selection pressure conform to this, in the little bit of time I've spent running around LA, its been very clear that popularity is the second most important factor in who gets opportunities for succes (the first still being who your parents are). Asking most journalists to imagine a world where their careers aren't highly staked to how many of their peers follow them on twitter is like asking fish to imagine living in trees. My guess you happen to have had such an anomalous trajectory (coming out of academia, finding early success on the internet, being embraced as a sort of counter-mainstream figurehead in certain circles, being a prolific and decent writer) that you just aren't aware of how pervasive this is, not just in journalism but everywhere. And again, I don't think that its the case that the people who compete in this sphere necessarily wouldn't prefer one that correlates more to say, how good their writing or reporting is, its just that they no longer have a way of imagining how that might look.
since i come out of evolution, i think of the 'iron law of institutions' in a group vs. individual level benefit context. individually this sort of behavior is beneficial and necessary for success. but on a group level it makes the broader unit far weaker and less robust. in normal course of biosocial evolution you develop regulators of ingroup dynamics so they don't become counterproductive and overwhelm group fitness (eg cheater detection mechanisms or hard to fake signals of commitment)
I think a bigger reason than "I buy into it and won't criticize it" is that what looks to me like an obvious race to the bottom in chasing the correct insider opinions just doesn't feel that way to the people involved.
I suspect that the people engaging in this disturbing behavior aren't occasionally realizing that they're jockeying for social status and then denying it. I think they've learned the conformity, the "well since we all know" way of speaking, and conformed, and felt rewarded for it. So they keep doing it.
I think this probably works at a subconscious level. I don't mean that in a Freudian sense but a more literal sense, the way that habits develop without us realizing it, and then the habit just feels like a fact of your reality, which makes it harder to notice and harder to change.
One thing I've always found interesting: Twitter lags way behind so many other social media apps in total number of users. Yet it has a strange, outsized impact. Probably because it's the media's drug of choice. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users
There is good evidence that we are all more likely to believe whatever our tribe says than some conclusion we arrived at on our own.
Once you see this in the journalism industry, you can't unsee it.
I appreciate FDB more than ever. As a conservative, I lost my tribe when I ditched Trump. I looked for intelligent progressive writers and found very few. Most are just in-grouping themselves and virtue signaling. Freddie isn't your prototype progressive, but he does believe in a lot of the causes. And I find his arguments to be thoughtful, and with good intent, even when I disagree. Thank you.