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Slate's 25th Anniversary Marked with Warning on Echo Chambers, Memories of 'Motivated Reasoning' on Microsoft (slate.com) 43

Posted by EditorDavid from the party-like-it's-1997 dept.
It's the 25th anniversary of Slate.com, and writer William Saletan reflects on the last quarter century. "Print magazines that scorned internet journalism collapsed or faded (it's hard to believe now, but in the '90s, people thought your article wasn't real if it wasn't on paper), while new websites popped up to challenge us. In the struggle for survival, many outlets withered and died. But Slate adapted and grew..."

But he also shares what worries him now about the online world we're living in: I don't see people learning from, or even recognizing, their mistakes. I see them caricaturing and gloating over the mistakes of others. In the old days, there was a lot of hope that the information age would make us smarter. It didn't. Instead, high-speed communication, combined with algorithms that discern our biases and feed us what we want, helped us sort ourselves into echo chambers. On Twitter, Facebook, Slack, and other platforms, we've formed like-minded battalions that quickly spot the other side's sins and falsehoods but are largely blind to our own.

I don't mean to suggest that tribalism is new or that it's always political. In the late '90s, when Microsoft was on trial for antitrust violations, Slate's top editors — all of whom drew Microsoft paychecks and had Microsoft stock options — were almost comically unanimous in their motivated reasoning. Their politics ranged from progressive to neoliberal to libertarian, but their behavior was essentially identical: They summoned all of their intellectual power, which was prodigious, and used it to poke holes in the antitrust case — in effect, to defend Microsoft.
Saletan argues that while the internet makes it easy to venture out from a "bubble" of viewpoints, too many idealists "insulated themselves from engagement with fundamentally opposing views...."

"So that's what I've learned in my time here: seek out other perspectives, study your failures, and try to become wiser every day."
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Slate's 25th Anniversary Marked with Warning on Echo Chambers, Memories of 'Motivated Reasoning' on Microsoft More

Slate's 25th Anniversary Marked with Warning on Echo Chambers, Memories of 'Motivated Reasoning' on Microsoft

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  • It's all bullshit... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by blahplusplus ( 757119 ) on Sunday February 20, 2022 @04:43PM (#62286571)

    ... the real issue is the brain wasn't selected for truth or reality (see religion).

    Our species is immature and backward. To get at the truth, you have to undermine your own position constantly and most people aren't ready nor willing to do that. It usually takes some major life event (like war) to get people to reconsider their views because they get how it is to live life in other peoples shoes when they are subject to their own views directly (aka having to literally kill others in iraq). When you have to look at your opponent face to face and pull the trigger, now you are directly responsible for someones death.

    Those are the kinds of experiences that change people.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Nice FP. Supporting citation is Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen. He focuses on the pro-fantasy history of America, but also the self-selection in favor of delusional and ambitious dreamers over the boring fools who stayed at home (in the old country) and maybe even tried to clean up their own messes. You touched on the religious aspects, and he gives them a lot of coverage, but I think the gold-rush mentality is possibly more important because the few winners tend to become disproportionately influential and

  • Journalists knew in the 90s (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday February 20, 2022 @04:50PM (#62286593)
    their days were numbered. My brother had one show up for career day and was told in no uncertain terms that computers and telecom were coming and it was going to kill journalism.

    Doesn't help that we basically let the top earners buy everything. The rules were changed allowing them to buy all the newspapers, radio, tv stations, etc. Anti-trust laws could only be enforced if there was a study showing consumer prices would go up, no consideration was given to the effect on the national discourse.

    You can see the end stage of this with what used to be a left wing news site called "The Hill". I noticed their content getting more and more "centrists" and eventually they started putting right wingers on their editorial board. Couldn't figure out what the hell happened.

    They got bought by a billionaire. It was a tiny pissant website and that billionaire went to the trouble of buying them. What the hell are you supposed to do in a market like that? Where do you go for a non-corporate viewpoint?

    The closest I can find our YouTubers like Beau Of The Fifth Column and Thought Slime and link aggregators like Fark.com that list the occasional bit of anti-corporate news.

    • I used to frequent Naked Capitalism and Jacobin for non-corporate views. The readers commentary began to feel too much like an echo chamber of sycophants, however.

      • Jacobin is one of a couple of left-wing outlets (arguably) named after genocidal maniacs. The Young Turks is he other one, and they are clearly named after genocidal maniacs. The historic Jacobins got into a rather epic fight in the West of the country, the Vendée. By the end of the conflict a quarter of the population was dead, the region was renamed Venge, and the pro-French Republic apologists frequently resort to the "it was a Civil War, therefore genocide can't have happened" defense.

        The only thin

    • The rules were changed allowing them to buy all the newspapers, radio, tv stations, etc. Anti-trust laws could only be enforced if there was a study showing consumer prices would go up, no consideration was given to the effect on the national discourse.

      I saw your comment and it made me think of a discussion involving Mark Blythe and Elizabeth Popp Berman. In short it is a discussion on how policy moved from a social or justice framework to an economic framework. For example, Berman describes how super-huge companies that look like monopolies were taken apart in the 1960s because they were felt to be bad for society (it makes the employer too powerful, it 'ruins' small town stores, etc.). Then the economic framework took over and the only reason to be a

  • Instead, high-speed communication, combined with algorithms that discern our biases and feed us what we want, helped us sort ourselves into echo chambers.

    Best simple example of the polarization between camps I've read yet.

    In the late '90s, when Microsoft was on trial for antitrust violations, Slate's top editors — all of whom drew Microsoft paychecks and had Microsoft stock options — were almost comically unanimous in their motivated reasoning. Their politics ranged from progressive to neoliberal to libertarian, but their behavior was essentially identical: They summoned all of their intellectual power, which was prodigious, and used it to poke holes in the antitrust case — in effect, to defend Microsoft.

    It is essentially the thing most likely to lead to humanity's ruin. Acting (and voting) outside one's own interest for the betterment of society is such a difficult task to ask of organisms programmed to selfishly protect themselves first.

    • It is essentially the thing most likely to lead to humanity's ruin. Acting (and voting) outside one's own interest for the betterment of society is such a difficult task to ask of organisms programmed to selfishly protect themselves first.

      That would be the simplistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution.

      An idea popularized by Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene [wikipedia.org] is that the focus should be shifted from the survival of individuals to the survival (replication) of the genes that they may perhaps share. The selfishness is at the genetic level. Thus we get such anomalies as ant colonies (infertile worker and soldier ants protecting the spawn of the queen) and war (defend your tribe even if you die). The members of an ant colony or tribe have more

      • In line with Dawkin's thought process, individuals behaving in their self-interest might necessarily form partnerships and alliances to better the chance of living to propagate their genes.

        If only there were a way to extend this self-interest to all of humanity... all of the species.

        • Some people I think are already doing this: maybe some of the climate change activists if they aren't in it simply for the social media hip factor. Now of course they would still be in the minority.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cas2000 ( 148703 )

      Acting (and voting) outside one's own interest

      Actually, this is trivially easy. So easy, it's routine, it's completely normal. People act and vote against their own interests all the time - it's why, for example, ordinary (non-billionaire) citizens will so readily vote for politicians and policies that fuck them over, why they believe that tax cuts for billionaires are good, and regulations (that protect their health and livelihoods and rights and much more) are inherently evil.

      All it takes is propaganda,

      • Actually, this is trivially easy. So easy, it's routine, it's completely normal. People act and vote against their own interests all the time - it's why, for example, ordinary (non-billionaire) citizens will so readily vote for politicians and policies that fuck them over, why they believe that tax cuts for billionaires are good, and regulations (that protect their health and livelihoods and rights and much more) are inherently evil.

        All it takes is propaganda, and that becomes self-perpetuating once saturation is achieved - once properly programmed with the "right" beliefs, people invent their own stories that build on and reinforce the brainwashing.

        It's why people now believe "good enough for government work" is a disparagement when originally it was praise because the government would buy only the best, why people think the "free market" means "free from regulation" instead of the actual, original meaning of "free from economic rent" and "free from landlords". It's why people think "intellectual property" is a real thing that actually exists and why it's common to refer to books, games, tv series, movies, etc as "IP"s.

        It's why people believe all sorts of absurd, ridiculous bullshit and then act on that bullshit and vote for it, even when it's completely obvious that doing so is very much against their own interests, both individually and collectively.

        If Dawkins is to be believed... acting in this fashion must get these people laid.

  • Bigest Issue (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday February 20, 2022 @05:18PM (#62286665)

    Echo chambers are fine, I don'tvlame people for wanting to hear mostly what makes them comfortable.

    What is going wrong in modern times, is more and more if you are not an any particular echo chamber, all people who are not 100% in that echo chamber are the enemy, and must covert wholly in order to be spared vicious attack.

    Really people should just let other people think different things.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Lije Baley ( 88936 )

      Looks like you've already made some people uncomfortable with such talk. Though they are probably just reacting to who you are, more than what you said this particular time.

      • Though they are probably just reacting to who you are, more than what you said this particular time.

        Probably so, and that itself is a further aspect of the problem - so many now think if a person says one thing they do not like, that no other possible thing can be said that would be good or valid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      Echo chambers are a new thing constructed by social media platforms. It requires the personalised automatic push tech.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by evanh ( 627108 )

        Without an echo chamber you're subjected to a lot more real facts. Eventually reality sinks in and you let go of the misconceptions.

      • Do you count Slashdot as a "social media platform", because back in the late 1990s and through the 2000s it was a horrific echo chamber. It's got better since, but it's still nowhere near balanced. And Slashdot definitely predates most social media platforms.

    • It's considerably worse than that. In my experience, people who skew left engage in thoughful conversations in professional contexts when they know they have to deal with you tomorrow, but online behind the perception of anonymity will not even recognize you as a human being if they perceive you're not one of them.

      They even invent all kind of childish memes and shorthand to blow off the idea of even engaging with people who don't hold views identical to them.

      "Sea lioning" is apparently a term for disingenuo

  • Why did Microsoft buy Slate and why does The Washington Post own it now?

    • Microsoft didn't buy slate, it founded slate. Remember AOL Time Warner? All the tech providers were worried about being left out of content, similar to how netflix has started creating content.

      There is a saying, "content is king." Bill Gates coined that phrase in an essay. (Well I'm not sure he coined it but that is the title of his essay). Key quotes:

      Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting."

      The television revolution that began

  • "So that's what I've learned in my time here: seek out other perspectives, study your failures, and try to become wiser every day."

    I wonder if that perspective, that we should admit our mistakes and engage in good faith with ideological adversaries, is enough to get him cancelled?

  • Tech bros had a lot of hope that the internet would make THEM smarter but society as a whole? Hate to break it to you, but I get the feeling that a lot of the people making > $100k salaries see the general public as Candy Crushing morons, and in the past they saw them as the morons with AOL.com email addresses!
  • https://mediabiasfactcheck.com... [mediabiasfactcheck.com]

  • Who's going to warn us about colossal irony, then?

  • So, it's not the anniversary of Slate's death? Slate is still alive?

    That is news!



    Seriously, though, the enemy aren't the dirty thems who think differently than the superior wes.

    The enemy is irrational thinking. If people could just recognize when they are being manipulated and would stop listening to folks that are doing the manipulating, things wouldn't be the way they are.

    Everyone needs to be taught rhetoric (a.k.a. debate) again. Once you understand informal fallacies [wikipedia.org], listening to the crap

  • Counterpoint: my information silo is filled with news.
    Your information silo (Fox News, Breitbart, Truth Social) is filled with horseshit.
    Why would I want to infect my silo with your non-factual horseshit?\
    Only takes 1 turd to ruin a pool party.

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