Bravo. I put more than four decades into newsroom journalism, and can tell you this piece is spot on when it comes to the media echo chamber. Any disagreement with the preferred narrative quickly makes you persona non grata.
Outstanding! I believe the corruption in our media may be our biggest problem. So very many people still accept what they tell us without doing any research.
I concur. I too have spent 20 years in an academic l/wing silo. Its bad. Its as made up as a christian conservative worldview was/is.
But. What else? GOP/Fox, mainstream media, religious leaders and all the rest of it we were spoonfed with until 25 years ago.
The Right is perhaps not as bad, but its just as self serving. And its anti learning altogether.
How about we all aim for honesty, objectivity and um, radical centrism? Consensus, working toward an America with civics, respect, dialogue, and no sagging pants or graffiti?
Your expansive description of the deep dark shadows on the Left are truly eye opening! My only caveat is that great caution should be exercised to keep from believing that the darkness on the Left is worse than the darkness on the Right. However revolting and disappointing is the mental and spiritual sewage on the Left, we cannot forget that many on the Right have facilitated the rise of a vile, vicious, and amoral conman to the highest office of this land! I pray that no one in the Free Black Thought community believes that he, in any way, has the concerns of conservatives or any Americans in mind.
I agree pretty much with your description of Trump, the person. But your description of him would serve pretty well to describe Biden and maybe even Kennedy. With those two we saw Dorian Gray; with Trump we see more of the Picture of Dorian Gray. But either way, it’s Dorian Gray. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
What concerns Trump the politician has in his mind are more difficult to divine. I think many on the old guard Right facilitated the rise of Biden out of their hatred of Trump and his crudeness.
Based on his first term it is possible, even reasonable, to conclude Trump’s policies fairly well served conservatives and Americans- with glaring exception that he failed to do anything meaningful toward reducing the deficit.
You’re right that Trump bears watching. The progressive Left, however, is well past the point of simply needing to be watched. They, and the old guard Right, made Trump possible.
Well-done piece. I particularly like the distinction you draw between consensus and truth.
Part of my work for decades has been with reliable manufacturing of consensus forecasts for predicting business trajectories in planning business activity.
It’s been devilishly difficult to even get simple language agreed upon for activities which guide billions of dollars of investments for large clients.
We forecast the weather, we plan picnics, we schedule activities, and we execute tasks, and we can measure facts of execution, schedule adherence, and plan deviation, and forecast accuracy - those measures are truth. If you don’t measure the truth of the system, then you go bankrupt over time.
We can’t always predict reality, but we can describe it (a type of prediction) and measure the result. Stating that there is no “objective reality” is another way of saying we cannot perfectly predict the future, but we can describe it pretty well and measure how well we do. A flood may not arrive at the appointed minute, but when it does arrive it’s not an objective reality we can ignore.
Sometimes objective reality is very easy to describe - sex is a binary - and as a truth it has remarkable predictive power, there is no measurable deviation. No person alive was conceived from other than one egg and one sperm from a mother and father respectively. Classifying that as misinformation doesn’t change the measured fact.
Consensus opinion for centuries was that the sun revolved around the earth, but we arrived at the truth that that didn’t measure up. We were told that that was fact but it was measurably false.
The nice thing about disinformation is that, over time, it has such low predictive power it always gets displaced by reliable information which provides measurable truth. Generally the system which creates misinformation goes “bankrupt” because it takes such time and energy to maintain the lie - “oh what a tangled web we weave”.
Companies go bankrupt all the time. People cease to use pseudo-sciences and they are abandoned. Entire political movements go bankrupt - from communism to Luddites. Huge religions disappear (Apollo does not pull the Sun) as systems better predicting reality come into place. People with extreme delusional psychoses - disconnect from objective reality - cease to be able to support their own lives. Three-Mile Island could not accurately recognize the reality of loss of coolant, and melted down.
I had a very large client 5 years ago who said they didn’t bother to measure their consensus forecasts, because they were so big it was irrelevant. The market bought all they sold. They’re on their Nth CEO now and on their way to a splitup.
Objective reality always has a hard biting edge.
[Misinformation has a cost, related to removing misinformation from a system, like “the internet”, or people’s education.
To erase a “bit” of misinformation costs $3.10 x 10^-28 dollars at current electricity costs in San Francisco, the minimum calculated costs according to the laws of physics, via Landauer’s principle, a set of interesting laws which describe things as different as black holes, the quantum physics of chips, and evolutionary drift.
The geocentric view of the solar system shifted to heliocentric over the period from Ptolemaic to Galilean, but harshly countered by the Church. The cost of the failure to adapt can be calculated as the impact of delay of scientific advancement by 50-100 years, perhaps $200B or more dollars in the period at today’s dollars along with all the teaching, writing, and punishment.
That’s roughly 6.37 x 10^29 bits which had to be erased in the world.
I wonder what the cost of vaccine misinformation is. Quite large and growing.]
The essence of misinformation is misdirection. The cover of misinformation is Gish galloping. Simplicity champions truth. Gaslighting champions despair. There is much unresolved cognitive dissonance in this article. We should all note it. We are in a struggle for truth, not cognitive consistency.
John 18:38. Consensus v. truth is not the same as consensus v. Fact. Culture is at issue - more so cultural viewpoint or “world view”. This is why you have more Democrats declared in the arts in academia than in the professions. Declaring could be career-ending for engineers, scientist and other professionals. I was once one of those and I did not declare. So, Groupthink, Inc. sounds like a made-up conspiracy. Culture exists in diversity or it dies. Persons often chose to disagree on things primarily based on culture - like whether we should assign persons a “race” or not on the US Census. Facts have little to do with that “truth”. This essay has not built the velocity to escape world of relativism (in a world where billionaires who could care less about expertise and the communication of expert opinions towards the goal of better facts and commonly held truths - only convincing others by force or Gish Gallop of spun information to choose their view) nor am I sure it heads on a helpful course. But within every complaint, there is a value being sought. What is that value!? But the value cannot be a polarization between so-called left and right wings of a staged political spectrum. As long as we approach it that way, we may remain stuck in a diversionary battle against each other. And that stuckness is where those who maintain power through wealth want everyone else to be. It will remain all relative to their level of control.
Interesting to me though that she didn't bring up how the hero George Floyd's killing somehow made every white person a white supremacist, every cop a criminal, every piece of US/Western history akin to slavery, how every job must go to a 'poc,' and every ad/actor on every billboard African American, in a nation of great diversity, and last, how every conversation about race became more biased, cherry picked and imagined than any of the other areas she cites, or indeed the racist view of Social Darwinists a century ago.
Ms. Smith, someone's destructive and immoral character will ultimately undermine whatever good things he or she may achieve. I am a retired pastor, who has seen the terrible harm done to people in the Church, by church leaders who were narcissistic, manipulative, egotistical, and greedy, notwithstanding their achievements as preachers, church builders, and ministry developers. I have seen the damage done by immoral and destructive leaders like Marion Berry, Kwame Kilpatrick, Edwin Edwards, and Bill Clinton, despite the good things they did. Trump's character is simply too bent to his darker proclivities, to let our mutual concerns about the Left's destructive folly distract us from fomenting destruction upon our country, the world, and the Church.
One tangential comment. When Trump says RFK, Jr uses "common sense," Trump is admitting that he does not understand science. Since Trump does not understand science, he cannot value it.
I've been writing about both Trump and the Woke insanity for years. Twiddle Dumb twiddle Dee. Some woke fools think that when Jefferson wrote "all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights including Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of happiness," he meant "enslave Black people."
A small but growing portion of humanity is awakening to a fundamental truth - the human experience is a lie. To "counter-disinformation" one must become more intuitive and develop the capacity to discern between those lies which are harmful and those which are helpful. Becoming "wise", which is using intuition over intellect for life's big choices, requires self-discipline and daily effort. One method of accomplishing this is Yogoda. I recently shared this methodology on Substack in "Intentional Living 2025": https://open.substack.com/pub/edsharrow/p/intentional-living-2025?r=xmzgz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Nicely written and right on point. Congrats on a piece that should be widely distributed, and even more kudos for escaping the bubble.
Bravo. I put more than four decades into newsroom journalism, and can tell you this piece is spot on when it comes to the media echo chamber. Any disagreement with the preferred narrative quickly makes you persona non grata.
Outstanding! I believe the corruption in our media may be our biggest problem. So very many people still accept what they tell us without doing any research.
I concur. I too have spent 20 years in an academic l/wing silo. Its bad. Its as made up as a christian conservative worldview was/is.
But. What else? GOP/Fox, mainstream media, religious leaders and all the rest of it we were spoonfed with until 25 years ago.
The Right is perhaps not as bad, but its just as self serving. And its anti learning altogether.
How about we all aim for honesty, objectivity and um, radical centrism? Consensus, working toward an America with civics, respect, dialogue, and no sagging pants or graffiti?
Even better? Stay offline.
Do not engage.
Less “sources “ more fart jokes.
Your expansive description of the deep dark shadows on the Left are truly eye opening! My only caveat is that great caution should be exercised to keep from believing that the darkness on the Left is worse than the darkness on the Right. However revolting and disappointing is the mental and spiritual sewage on the Left, we cannot forget that many on the Right have facilitated the rise of a vile, vicious, and amoral conman to the highest office of this land! I pray that no one in the Free Black Thought community believes that he, in any way, has the concerns of conservatives or any Americans in mind.
I agree pretty much with your description of Trump, the person. But your description of him would serve pretty well to describe Biden and maybe even Kennedy. With those two we saw Dorian Gray; with Trump we see more of the Picture of Dorian Gray. But either way, it’s Dorian Gray. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
What concerns Trump the politician has in his mind are more difficult to divine. I think many on the old guard Right facilitated the rise of Biden out of their hatred of Trump and his crudeness.
Based on his first term it is possible, even reasonable, to conclude Trump’s policies fairly well served conservatives and Americans- with glaring exception that he failed to do anything meaningful toward reducing the deficit.
You’re right that Trump bears watching. The progressive Left, however, is well past the point of simply needing to be watched. They, and the old guard Right, made Trump possible.
Well-done piece. I particularly like the distinction you draw between consensus and truth.
Part of my work for decades has been with reliable manufacturing of consensus forecasts for predicting business trajectories in planning business activity.
It’s been devilishly difficult to even get simple language agreed upon for activities which guide billions of dollars of investments for large clients.
We forecast the weather, we plan picnics, we schedule activities, and we execute tasks, and we can measure facts of execution, schedule adherence, and plan deviation, and forecast accuracy - those measures are truth. If you don’t measure the truth of the system, then you go bankrupt over time.
We can’t always predict reality, but we can describe it (a type of prediction) and measure the result. Stating that there is no “objective reality” is another way of saying we cannot perfectly predict the future, but we can describe it pretty well and measure how well we do. A flood may not arrive at the appointed minute, but when it does arrive it’s not an objective reality we can ignore.
Sometimes objective reality is very easy to describe - sex is a binary - and as a truth it has remarkable predictive power, there is no measurable deviation. No person alive was conceived from other than one egg and one sperm from a mother and father respectively. Classifying that as misinformation doesn’t change the measured fact.
Consensus opinion for centuries was that the sun revolved around the earth, but we arrived at the truth that that didn’t measure up. We were told that that was fact but it was measurably false.
The nice thing about disinformation is that, over time, it has such low predictive power it always gets displaced by reliable information which provides measurable truth. Generally the system which creates misinformation goes “bankrupt” because it takes such time and energy to maintain the lie - “oh what a tangled web we weave”.
Companies go bankrupt all the time. People cease to use pseudo-sciences and they are abandoned. Entire political movements go bankrupt - from communism to Luddites. Huge religions disappear (Apollo does not pull the Sun) as systems better predicting reality come into place. People with extreme delusional psychoses - disconnect from objective reality - cease to be able to support their own lives. Three-Mile Island could not accurately recognize the reality of loss of coolant, and melted down.
I had a very large client 5 years ago who said they didn’t bother to measure their consensus forecasts, because they were so big it was irrelevant. The market bought all they sold. They’re on their Nth CEO now and on their way to a splitup.
Objective reality always has a hard biting edge.
[Misinformation has a cost, related to removing misinformation from a system, like “the internet”, or people’s education.
To erase a “bit” of misinformation costs $3.10 x 10^-28 dollars at current electricity costs in San Francisco, the minimum calculated costs according to the laws of physics, via Landauer’s principle, a set of interesting laws which describe things as different as black holes, the quantum physics of chips, and evolutionary drift.
The geocentric view of the solar system shifted to heliocentric over the period from Ptolemaic to Galilean, but harshly countered by the Church. The cost of the failure to adapt can be calculated as the impact of delay of scientific advancement by 50-100 years, perhaps $200B or more dollars in the period at today’s dollars along with all the teaching, writing, and punishment.
That’s roughly 6.37 x 10^29 bits which had to be erased in the world.
I wonder what the cost of vaccine misinformation is. Quite large and growing.]
The essence of misinformation is misdirection. The cover of misinformation is Gish galloping. Simplicity champions truth. Gaslighting champions despair. There is much unresolved cognitive dissonance in this article. We should all note it. We are in a struggle for truth, not cognitive consistency.
John 18:38. Consensus v. truth is not the same as consensus v. Fact. Culture is at issue - more so cultural viewpoint or “world view”. This is why you have more Democrats declared in the arts in academia than in the professions. Declaring could be career-ending for engineers, scientist and other professionals. I was once one of those and I did not declare. So, Groupthink, Inc. sounds like a made-up conspiracy. Culture exists in diversity or it dies. Persons often chose to disagree on things primarily based on culture - like whether we should assign persons a “race” or not on the US Census. Facts have little to do with that “truth”. This essay has not built the velocity to escape world of relativism (in a world where billionaires who could care less about expertise and the communication of expert opinions towards the goal of better facts and commonly held truths - only convincing others by force or Gish Gallop of spun information to choose their view) nor am I sure it heads on a helpful course. But within every complaint, there is a value being sought. What is that value!? But the value cannot be a polarization between so-called left and right wings of a staged political spectrum. As long as we approach it that way, we may remain stuck in a diversionary battle against each other. And that stuckness is where those who maintain power through wealth want everyone else to be. It will remain all relative to their level of control.
Amazing article.
Interesting to me though that she didn't bring up how the hero George Floyd's killing somehow made every white person a white supremacist, every cop a criminal, every piece of US/Western history akin to slavery, how every job must go to a 'poc,' and every ad/actor on every billboard African American, in a nation of great diversity, and last, how every conversation about race became more biased, cherry picked and imagined than any of the other areas she cites, or indeed the racist view of Social Darwinists a century ago.
Ms. Smith, someone's destructive and immoral character will ultimately undermine whatever good things he or she may achieve. I am a retired pastor, who has seen the terrible harm done to people in the Church, by church leaders who were narcissistic, manipulative, egotistical, and greedy, notwithstanding their achievements as preachers, church builders, and ministry developers. I have seen the damage done by immoral and destructive leaders like Marion Berry, Kwame Kilpatrick, Edwin Edwards, and Bill Clinton, despite the good things they did. Trump's character is simply too bent to his darker proclivities, to let our mutual concerns about the Left's destructive folly distract us from fomenting destruction upon our country, the world, and the Church.
One tangential comment. When Trump says RFK, Jr uses "common sense," Trump is admitting that he does not understand science. Since Trump does not understand science, he cannot value it.
I've been writing about both Trump and the Woke insanity for years. Twiddle Dumb twiddle Dee. Some woke fools think that when Jefferson wrote "all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights including Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of happiness," he meant "enslave Black people."
A small but growing portion of humanity is awakening to a fundamental truth - the human experience is a lie. To "counter-disinformation" one must become more intuitive and develop the capacity to discern between those lies which are harmful and those which are helpful. Becoming "wise", which is using intuition over intellect for life's big choices, requires self-discipline and daily effort. One method of accomplishing this is Yogoda. I recently shared this methodology on Substack in "Intentional Living 2025": https://open.substack.com/pub/edsharrow/p/intentional-living-2025?r=xmzgz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true