Science and Media Getting Truth Wrong

Institutions, Systems and Error Correction

Error correction cannot occur effectively in an institution or dedicated media outlet. That’s the wrong scale.

It can only occur in an open, widely populated system with high variation.

Errors are not things to identify and extract; that is reductionist nonsense. Errors occur dynamically, in ill-defined ways, and can only be corrected in an equally dynamic fashion.

The correct scale sits above deliberate engineering, at a level that is self-organizing. Only at this scale does a system contain what is needed to maintain its health and adaptability over time.

Science as an activity is error correcting, but science as an institution is not. Media driven by citizens is error correcting, but media as an institution is not.

The world does not need large, dedicated, long-established entities that attempt to shape public discourse, culture, and society. Their structured operations, “journalistic/scientific standards” and authority are naive and dangerous interventions in an otherwise self-correcting system.

The attempt to extract every possible error from a system is to create the biggest error of all; the one that destroys the system altogether. What appears as misleading and fallible when zoomed-in too close is in fact the set of critical ingredients needed for the only mechanism capable of revealing truth over time.

Man cannot create things more sophisticated or capable than nature. Letting go is not a loss of control, it is the intelligent and rational decision to respect and leverage nature’s mechanisms.

An intelligent society does not intervene. It observes, permits and builds knowledge and things over time, based on how nature actually works.

Open and dynamic is how nature works.