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Mike Addertion's avatar

I have no real insight as to how much effort is required to research, collate, and corroborate all the possible newsletters in the world into three pertinent suggestions each week. I suspect the process is quite time consuming. So my comment is just to say thank you to JVL and the Bulwark staff for providing the weekly newsletter selections. They make me smarter.

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Uncle Abe's Revenge's avatar

Don't use Twitter, rarely read Twitter, unless it's someone whose views I specifically care about, like a real expert on Russia or military affairs. Twitter is bad, but I think it will be replaced, unfortunately. We had Vine, (which Twitter owned, but shut down), and it was replaced by TikTok. Twitter's misuse and distortion illustrates three points I'll focus on.

1. The thirst for data: People, people in politics and journalism especially, are desperately hungry to know what people think for obvious reasons. Twitter provides that, even if it's distorting and basically bad data. It's better than nothing, goes the thinking (which is wrong, because "I don't know what people think" is less harmful than misunderstanding what people think.)

2. Low journalistic standards: Even if it's bad, it's available. Journalists are desperate for sources, and Twitter is available for instant hot takes. Polls don't exist on every issue that just happened. Twitter offers the illusion of data aggregation that tells you what large numbers of people think in the absence of a poll. The 24/7 news cycle demands hot takes, so despite knowing it's bad data, it's used, because the incentives demand publishing something. This reminds me of a lot of early globalization reporting where reporters interviewed a handful of urban elites living in, say, Cairo or New Delhi, and concluded everyone was becoming little Americans because they drank Coke, wore jeans, and talked like Americans. Fly into a capital, talk to a few people, and fly out.

3. Evolutionary cognitive biases: Humans evolved in small bands or tribes, and later lived in small villages for most of history. If ten people in a row said they hated you, it was probably a universal feeling. You were at risk of getting kicked out of the tribe/village, and you were going to die unless you stopped doing whatever they disliked. If you asked a question and 10 people (out of 20-30) told you the same answer, it was probably what pretty much everybody believed. Our minds are wired in this way, that is, to respond to a barrage of uniform opinions, especially from people who are prominent or known to us. It is incredibly difficult to counter these biases even when you know they exist, and most people, I estimate, don't even really understand they exist.

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