Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

We're witnessing a powerful feedback loop in the media: paint-by-numbers journalism sets a narrative, the lack of context and nuance leaves little for the audience to do but pick from the narratives offered, and then, having made a selection, punish sources that go off-narrativehttps://twitter.com/balajis/status/1170821709093470208 …

Why punish sources that go off-narrative? Because choosing narratives has become the default strategy for understanding the world. To offer conflicting narratives is to imply that you can't provide infallible understanding, and a readership expecting that will feel betrayed

Why would a readership expect infallible understanding...? What else would they expect, after a decade or two consuming information-as-fact with little deviation in classroom environments?

I know we're not supposed to tell journalists to learn to code, but it really might make for better journalists, because it's one of the few activities with an assumption-result cycle fast enough to force the stubborn human mind to see how wrong it is nearly all of the time