How Citizen Journalism & Education Reform Can Save Us from Bad Science

In traditional journalism, there are strong incentives to act maliciously. Journalists are incentivized to optimize for views and clicks. The answer is not to reform the industry. We can change media through radical decentralization. Everyone becomes a journalist. Each person writes about their local issues or areas of expertise

What can we trust? Why is the 'information ecology' so damaged, and what would it take to make it healthy? This is a fundamental question, because without good sensemaking, we cannot even begin to act in the world. It is also a central concern in what many are calling the "meaning crisis", because what is meaningful is connected to what is real.

For decades, editors left thousands of important stories off radio, newspapers, and televisions. Without awareness of an issue, people are uninformed because they don’t even know an issue exists. But on the internet, mistakes are made out in the open, in public, where everybody can see them. Transgressions are captured, shared, and amplified by the... See more