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0 pointspatrec7y ago0 comments

Maybe we need more delegation experts? Recursively? ;) Anyway, you originally wrote:

> you can't trust any organization to evaluate news sources. That can't be true.

But it can.

Successful delegation requires alignment of incentives, oversight or some (well founded) trust relationship. Otherwise, if the stakes are high enough (and if you get to shape the voting or news-consumption and non-consumption of a sizeable fraction of people, they are) bad things will happen to those who are willing delegate, in aggregate.

What makes the expert more trustworthy than the politician or news-source itself? Why would you be better at picking one than the other? Credentials? Max Boot is one of the “world's leading authorities on armed conflict” and well-credentialed (academically and organizationally). Do you trust him? Did the American Tax Payers get a good return of investment of following his expertise laid out in “The Case for American Empire” to the tune of a few trillion Dollars?

Tucker Carlson says no, we shouldn't trust Max Boot. Should we trust him instead? Why not?

The answer is that you can only delegate these things to the extent you're able and willing to critically evaluate the quality and basis of the advice (since you have no mechanism to align incentives). And I'd be shocked if you could come up with a single broadly trustworthy news source evaluation organization -- I am not aware of one, are you? Assuming there is one, how would it stay that way longer term?

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tptacek7y ago· 1 in thread

I don't understand your argument. Obviously, if you refuse to delegate any decision you make to experts, you will make worse decisions. If evaluating news media isn't your full-time job, you will do a poorer job of it than someone who was trained to do it and has years of experience and context to do it with.

You seem to be under the weird impression that I'm saying all experts are trustworthy. No, obviously not. I don't trust Max Boot (I trust Tucker Carlson far less). I'm selective about who I delegate parts of my decisionmaking to, and you should be too.

Again: the point isn't that NewsGuard is good (I have no idea if it is). The point is that the very concept of NewsGuard doesn't offend reason or civic virtue.

patrecOP7y ago

I'm wondering if we're talking past each other because each of us has a different idea what "delegating" means in this discussion. I'm not against consulting various "fact checking" services to help inform my opinion and help uncover pointers to relevant evidence I can follow up on my own if I wish to. I would however neither trust their impartiality, nor believe that they have some inherent magical expertise that would make them vastly better at those evaluations than me (in both cases: what would the selection function for this look like and why wouldn't it equally apply to news in the first place? News sources don't thrive by giving their readers hard to swallow, non-partisan facts and evaluation – they are inherently tribal).

But "delegating" to me means completely offloading some task to a third party, even if it's one you've vetted before and maybe periodically check on.

To me, delegation in this sense for what news sources I expose myself to offends both reason and civic virtue.

I don't believe in the existence of particularly trustworthy new sources with broad coverage. That such trust is misplaced is easy to verify by picking a few particular examples where you can dig in a bit yourself. Therefore one should be able to get useful information from people one disagrees with or even believes to be evil or dishonest, as long as they're at least periodically willing to make cogent, evidence based arguments. I can despise Tucker Carlson and still agree with him on his evaluation of Max Boot, by looking up the evidence he presents and validating if it supports his claims. Same with Chomsky, Engelhardt etc.

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