Funny quote and all (no sarcasm intended) but I don't think it's fair to imply that, if future wars are bloodier than the past, it would be because we lowered barriers to communication.
I think when we consider what Facebook has taught us about anonymity vs real name policies we have to also remember that Facebook's feed disproportionately rewards sensationalist content.
"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?"
I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.
A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became optimized for engagement (ie: emotional reactions), and so are disproportionally rewarding sensationalist content over content that actually promotes understanding of other perspectives.
> Nor is the “team of rivals” concept an innovation of the early 1860s, though Goodwin assures us it is.
What an odd critique: Lincoln did this great thing, but he didn't invent it, so who cares?
Beyond that being an odd critique, I've read that book twice and although Goodwin highly praises Lincoln's leadership style, I don't recall her assuring us that that was an "innovation" at all. Of course, like most book critics, this writer spent more time on snark than citations.
The idea of raising money to speed up high quality execution instead of raising money to add “months of runway" is a powerful re-framing IMO. One of those reframes that sounds so simple one may overlook how different these two mindsets are, and how easy and tempting it is to fall into thinking about "months of runway".
I'd argue that general point is the most important idea in this article. Unfortunately I think the discussion on that more general point may get drowned out by the discussion of the weaker (and not as widely applicable) secondary idea in the title — raising less money.
A few tips from my RSI journey. I had developed a severe case ~8ish years ago. It took 1.5 years before I could code full-time again. Was a very painful period. It's still difficult for me to code beyond 40 hours a week, which makes side projects difficult.
The most effective techniques for my (partial) recovery, and for keeping the severe pain at bay for the last 6 years:
- I never ever use standard computer mice, and try to avoid the trackpad as much as possible. For me, they were worse than the keyboard. Instead, I've been using a Wacom tablet (with pen) for years. I've gotten several colleagues who were experiencing pain to use pen tablets as well, with uniformly good results.
- Further reducing the need to leave the keyboard by switching to vim and also using spectacle for window management. I found vim-adventures.com very effective for learning vim - not affiliated with the project in anyway, just a very happy user.
- Always coding with my elbow a touch over 90 degrees. I find that placing the keyboard on my lap is the most comfortable (although that maybe dependant on body proportions). In my opinion most desks are way to high for comfortable ergonomics, my lap happens to be everywhere I am, so that's convenient.
- Plenty of exercise developing back muscles (which I had completely neglected prior)
I intend to move user contributed fact verifications to some sort of distributed ledger model to ensure transparency. Still in alpha though, so lots of work ahead.
The assumption behind this idea isn't that there are no accurate journalism outlets out there, it's that by "open sourcing" their fact checking, these outlets will better stand out, adopting a standard that inaccurate outlets just can't meet.
Right now, outlets are basically asking you to trust their assertions based on their brand. Fewer and fewer readers are inclined to give their trust based on brand (I'm guessing this is because there are just so many outlets/brands now). The way forward is for journalists to earn their readers' trust by showing their work on as many fact checks as possible. It won't be possible for every fact check (such as those involving anonymous sources) but where possible, it'll add a great deal of value.
You'll notice that on this platform every proven fact is annotated. As a result, proven statements stand out from unproven statements. This forces the writer to be upfront about which assertions are proven, and which are speculation/opinion.
I maybe misunderstanding your question, but this platform only accepts public primary sources as valid evidence. A media news story is never a primary source for proving the assertions within it, it's a secondary source.
Thanks for the feedback, the second (accessibility) should be a quick fix.
I definitely also want to address the first issue, the tricky part is coming up with a solution that also works when there are multiple assertions on one line, but I'll give it more thought.
Indeed, manual vetting is only for alpha. I should reiterate - the point of this type of open fact checking is you can always verify everything for yourself, so you don't need to trust my credentials.
Long term every review, even those that are flagged, will be accessible. Albeit, those that are flagged will be in a separate section, but the point is they will always be accessible, so that you never have to trust me or the community, you can always review for yourself.
I truly believe that post-publication fact checking is a losing battle. If you take a sampling of redaction tweets by media outlets and compare their retweet counts to the retweet counts of the original posting you'll see that that is very much the case.
This is more a communication standard than a complicated tech solution. A communication standard for fact checks from public primary sources.
Coding this wasn't actually that complicated, figuring out a design that enables readers to review the fact checking as easily as possible and enables fact checkers to collaborate easily took a lot of experimentation though. Although even that is still very much a work in progress.
You're 100% correct in that one can cite completely valid facts and still push an agenda by omitting other facts. I'm actually working on a "fact comment section" feature where any reader can pin facts to an article (facts that still go through the same rigorous and open fact checking process as everything else). Facts which readers deem are important extra context.
However, I'd argue that even without such a feature, having an open standard for facts openly verified from primary sources will add a lot of value to current public discourse.
Indeed, currently all "verified" reviewers are manually vetted.
Long term the goal is to have an open reputation score for every fact checker. I'm currently experimenting with different implementations of this, and seeing good promise.
The goal is to capture the fact checking process and enable any reader to review it for themselves. Certainly some publications currently have an excellent fact checking process, but very few make their fact checking open and transparent.
As for "how do you replicate work like calling sources to verify statements before publication?" Good question. Currently this is only designed to open up the fact checking which involves public primary sources. I think that a platform that focuses on doing that subset of fact checking really really well can add a lot of value to the public discourse.