[Recycled Rant to Art Appraiser & Michael Wolraich]

This new social fact-challenged journalism is not a dissertation, is not your father's evening gazette, is not a bunch of freshman working at the college paper or cub reporter learning the ropes. It's war & politics by other means. It's eat or be eaten, except we're always so close to winning we're lulled into thinking we're almost not losing.

There are elections being stolen, there are good policies being killed and bad ones being created, and just because we've made a slight dent in righting the record doesn't mean we're terribly succeeding or that the system isn't broke or needs a drastic update to function well in 2017.

There's a meetup of a rigged media factory, politicians in permanent state of collusion, a bigger influx of money than we ever thought possible, then came a new-found acceptance of blatant lies as both palatable and even a positive to rally behind, and now hacking by a foreign government both stealing and spouting out fake "news" on a broad top-to-bottom scale to make it even worse, yet supposedly we just need to stay grownup and write the truth and we'll prevail. Not even much done on the psychological Kahnemann/NLP/other alternative ways of understanding how we digest (& don't digest) information and are easily deceived.

We sat there reassured last Fall that Hillary had at least won the 3 debates overwhelmingly, except that in checking audience reactions, for people who thought the debates important or crucial for voting (or some such phrasing), Trump actually won among that group. How? People just see stuff different - it's no use trying to explain it unless we're going to dive into it to see what actually forms opinion, not just reeks of "the truth".

The recent article by the activist on OWS was noting that nobody ever asked "is what we're doing advancing our agenda?" - instead it was all phrased in finding and fighting always for the exact policy, and with it defining who's in, who's out.

We've taken the old journalist model and just plopped the internet/Facebook/Twitter on top, with an expectation that the same rules will always apply, that J School 1923 equals J School 2017, even as media giants have come and gone, been merged, been decimated, been coopted by General Electric and Microsoft and Amazon and Murdoch tied to a new generation of likes and sharing and mixing social entertainment with hard news, interactive opinion tied to mud slinging & internet free-for-alls, etc. As the line from Butch Cassidy went, "Rules? What Rules?"

Nate Silver talks over and over about the liberal bubble, and few actually listen to him. His problem with pollsters and similar reporters was that they kept ignoring the cross-pollination across near borders, between similar papers, etc. - folks may think they're independent, but they ignore the interdependencies that bias the data, and multiply that in 4 different disregarded ways we can be working with 60-70% uncertainty - i.e. worse than a coin toss - rather than the 2-3% "margin of error" we typically see stamped on.

From scientific work, sometimes a system works better with *more noise* injected into the system, not less - a bit too much analogically like the old intermarried royal families of Europe.

Here's more Silver:

I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues5 that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

1. Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
2. Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
3. Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
4. Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”

Now this is a bit different from running a political movement or the art of modern reporting, but there are seeds of the same ideas in all. There's some chaos needed in political movements - especially in fast moving modern times - or ideas and approaches become brittle and old-fashioned, even in as short a period of 5 years. Our idea of journalism is all on-the-record, properly vetted and run through the right brand stuff, and we don't seem troubled that we're all quoting the same NYTimes/WaPo/Huffpost/CNN/Guardian 95% of the time, and the journalists we're referencing are reading the same articles or carefully cultivated similars.

The share of total exposure8 for the top five news sources9 climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. 

The Titanic was not to be predicted by a manual on "Proper Operation of Steamships Under Typical Sailing conditions". Referencing Kahneman, we seem to be masturbating our Fast Thinking brain regularly, and leaving our Slow Thinking analytical mind starved for real convoluted, contradictory, difficult to process brain food, basically the coarse fiber that would cleanse the gut, instead assuring ourselves that pre-processed nuourishment is a healthier diet than complex foods.

We're being lied to all the time, and if not, the ones giving us info are making huge mistakes that are barely acknowledge except on page 27 next to the crossword. We're better off with a healthy mistrust of the system - political, journalistic, philosophical, economic, social. Instead of a semiconductor clean room to eat our dinner in, we need healthier metabolisms that aren't so sensitive to impurities, be they disease or fraud.

I remember a friend in Tokyo saying he could walk across a dance floor bumping into people and no one would complain - and then did just that. In a society of hyper-agreeable, non-confrontational people, it's easy to see how they're setting themselves up like Asia before the Mongol Hordes. 

But we're doing much the same way in acclimatizing ourselves to losing, and all the ways we can enable and justify that outcome. Yes, the end frequently justifies the means, and not every use of that equation is a slippery slope to Nürnberg or Soviet show trials. We need to embrace power and persuasion a bit better than just an appeal to cold intellectual reason.

Many get inspired by Bernie wanting to shake up the party, yet curiously resist the similar needed change in other spheres. The DNC *is* slow, outdated, not helpful enough, not enough on the ball, etc. - as is government including law enforcement, journalistic establishment, and other stalwarts of our stable, conservative society. 

PS - and yes, it's ironic and paradoxical that I would use such a classical form of long-winded literary response that will literally persuade no one that doesn't already agree. Still not post-modern nor post-millennial despite all my efforts.

PPS - looks like journalist slamming will replace midget tossing as the the tyrant's first and last bastion of sick fun. No repercussions reads the new journalist carnet, only concussions (though Megyn Kelly and the other "Foxes" at Fox News have provided a bit of push back on the Roger's Angels funhouse - we'll see how long that lasts)