The Weekly: Issue #2
Weekly Publishing
The Consilience Project
An emergent alliance between interest groups such as corporations or activists, and intellectuals who produce narratives and arguments, is shaping the information ecosystem. Many intellectuals respond to incentives from the interest groups to argue for predetermined positions in exchange for money, prestige, and an audience. Arguments with no backers are not disseminated as widely and often go unheard. This piece uses several brief case studies to illustrate how this affects reporting and public discourse. An open society requires an awareness of why and how our information is produced and shared, as well as the wider social norms necessary to keep interest groups from overly polluting the information environment. As the paralysis of the American political system in recent decades has shown, these critical capacities are essential to ensure that partisanship and selective reporting do not drown out accurate analysis.
The Consilience Project in the Media
In a special Your Undivided Attention episode from the Center for Humane Technology, Daniel Schmachtenberger shares how we can - and must - evolve our collective capacity to solve problems. Listen in.
