Improving the News with Max Tegmark

[Music] this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson this episode i'm calling a physicist reads the newspaper chuck hey i'm not that physical you're not that's okay just in case anybody was wondering in fact every comedy routine is really a comedian reads the newspaper right because you're typically there's a lot of commenting on absolutely on on current events yeah but so this show was created because i saw this product out there this thing this interface that i just said i got to get the creator of that interface on star talk and that creator is a physicist an old-time friend and colleague max tegmark max welcome back to star talk thank you neil all right max is professor of physics at mit does a lot of different things with his life he's got a couple of books out there uh he loves the subject of ai and thinking deep thoughts about the future of civilization and our ability to be the be good shepherds of the power we have over ourselves and what that means so max you've got this thing i've been reading about called improve the news this is very ambitious of you and you did this like what you did this you did this for your summer covid vacation oh my god so what is it wait a minute is this a physicist's version of the clay ashtray that that you bring home from summer camp yeah yeah well the little macrame thing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah what did max do for his summer vacation and what does it have to do with the news well it actually goes all the way back to when they locked down mit in march i just thought i'm going to go stir crazy and i decided to pick the single thing i was most upset about and just try to do something a little bit useful about it and that was this is march 2020 when they closed down yes indeed not only mit many other schools who were smart closed down right about right right there in march okay yeah and i i i'm feeling as i'm sure many of you who are listening to this also feel that our democracy hasn't been doing so great recently there are increasing signs of polarization and dysfunction and it's not just here in america it's happening a lot on the global scale also and um i think it's so easy to slip into this over quick diagnosis and just say oh it's because of so and so it's their fault that's it you know i i think the root cause of this is a lot deeper it actually has a lot to do with um with machine learning people have stopped reading the newspaper on paper very much and most people get their news now from social media and so on and they are constantly being manipulated by these algorithms they're just trying to show them whatever they're going to click on the most to maximize the ad revenue right and and an unfortunate result of this i have a lot of friends you know in the companies that do this who totally haven't seen it coming the unfortunate result is that uh just to be clear the companies that do this that's euphemism for facebook for twitter for instagram that's that's euphemism oh for sure google yeah yeah so they want they've these algorithms discovered that the best way to keep people glued to their rectangles is to show them things that elicit strong feelings that piss them off for example it doesn't matter so much if it's true or not as long as it has the effect of gluing them to their screens and and this is called trap people and these so-called filter bubbles where they just read more and more stuff that reinforces whatever conceptions they had and it's gotten to the point that people with different views can't even talk in civilized ways with each other anymore and start to hate each other and i just started to think hey why is it that i never see two science friends fight as bitterly about the interpretation of quantum mechanics as i see people insulting each other across party lines over politics what is it that we do right in the scientific truth seeking that maybe we could share and beam into the media landscape a little bit you know the old the that we have this pretty good scheme for how to figure out what's true actually and it's called science right so i decided to code up this uh tool which you mentioned here and as a this is the university we did it for students for fun so it's free no ads anything and it's been really fun you know i love the idea of democracy but for it to flourish people have to have a good understanding of what's actually happening in the world right only then will they vote in their self-interest and do constructive things and i think i'm not the only person who feels that the overall quality of my news has been going down so hey if we can improve it a little bit you know awesome so max i don't want to interrupt but i just got to ask you in in your development of this improve the news tool um did you factor in uh the fact that most americans are stupid i actually feel that this is shocking not only i'm just saying i'm just saying that that's a factor that is a factor i would say this is propaganda exactly the big companies that uh that that's keeping running algorithms that trap people into phase with the burglars to just blame it on the consumer it's the same old trick that tobacco companies used to use with say oh it's not our fault that the children start smoking cigarettes they're just stupid don't blame us right um okay it's a way of shifting blame what's actually happening of course is we can only an ordinary american can only choose between the things they have access to and if we're const if we have very weird sort of choices we have to pick between them and what happens happen so i wanted to make it easier for people to actually break out of their filter bubble a little bit and see other points of view right so you're not actually creating new news you're changing how people gain access to news precisely that is why about a rag tag band of nerds like myself could actually do something like this and make it free because trading news would be super expensive that would be a journalism project here the premise is that there are actually a lot of interesting news out there and a lot of news which are very misleading and to create a tool it just makes it easier for people to navigate this so first people told me max you know this is never going to work because people are stupid people just want to be told what they already believe but as i said i don't buy that and in fact there's a really nice study by a colleague of mine in mit professor david rand also suggesting that actually people like to be to find out if they're wrong if as long as it's presented in a respectful way right if you're planning on doing a little startup company wouldn't you like it if some friend explains to you that this is never going to work and explains what you've missed of course you want to know that right but if he starts by just insulting you you're not even going to listen to the rest and and in today's media landscape if you have someone who's only been reading this particular media source and they decide to take a walk on the wild side and go look at something else and the first thing they see is like a photo of their favorite politicians that's chosen to be deliberately ugly to illustrate the article and then there's some really really strong insulting words they'll just sort of tune out um so what what happens instead if you go to improve the news.org is you're in the driver's seat you have these different sliders you can move around one of them says nuance on it so if you don't want to be insulted just dial up the high nuance and then if you want to see now what other what other people are reading who disagree with you you can take this left right slider for example and move it over a little bit to the other side and now see on the same topic that you had chosen to read about that other parallel universe so to speak of what people are saying there if you um there's another slider which is also important called the establishment slider so of course most of the big newspapers are owned by powerful companies and so on who don't want a lot of news saying bad things about themselves uh so if you if you if you'd like to see more criticism of of the powerful you can play with that other slider and it makes it basically very easy for you to um explore alternative viewpoints so i did it i'm i'm actually on improve the news.org right now i figured you know what why why just listen to you about it i mean you're only the guy that created it why why do i got to take your word for it wait so max so what you're saying is you are an aggregator in a in a in a an interface that filters according to sliders that's right that's right all right so now so now is this every single news source that's out there is breitbart one of the search places is is okay so so uh is totally extreme left-wing right-wing propaganda in there is there you know if if this were 1937 germany would hitler's stuff be in there and his pamphlets like is where is there a limit to the edges of this that you have selected yeah there are two limits one is you know this we just was just a ragtag bunch of folks we couldn't put everything that's out there but it has right now a lot of stuff about a hundred different newspapers really spanning the political spectrum the main limit is it's just english language stuff uh second there's nothing in there that advocates violence for example so if any kind of hit their stuff would you would not find there you know okay all right whiteboard is in there uh whatever you think of them they they there there's a there's there's a very broad spectrum out on the fringes where there's a lot of crazy stuff and and as long as they're not they're respecting the democratic ideals and so on they're in there and the idea of this is very much not to be some sort of orwellian thing that tells you what you should read but put you in the driver's seat instead so in other words normally when you go out and seek the news right what happens is facebook or google or whatever will remember all the things you clicked on before and figure well this is probably what neil is going to click on right so you're basically selecting your news impulsively through your clicks it's just like if you selected what you were going to eat by just walking through an all-you-can-eat buffet and always just picking things up on impulse i want to try instead to see what happens if people are giving given a more deliberative opportunity to choose their news diet kind of like when you plan out what you're going to buy ahead of time in the supermarket instead right and say i want to try i want to read about these topics a little bit more of these topics a little bit less i want to try and look at from this perspective um put you in charge so i'm on your site right now and i have to say one this is an excellent idea okay it's freaking brilliant i spent i spent an hour on it yesterday yeah it is really really i mean it's and the reason why it's so great is because it's so simplistic you know um now the second thing i want to know max is is this proprietary did you actually take these programs and register them own them so that when we sell this to every news organization we will they will not be able to come in and just take this technology because the truth is as the fact is that this allows the um the advertising model to still stay intact but still gives the reader some freedom and some agency over the content that they're consuming so you know reputable news agencies should actually be using something like this because it really is a a very good tool for the reader oh thank you my goal with this is to never make one cent on it ever i know that's supposed to be my goal max that's what i'm that's what i'm here for that's why there are no ads that's why it's free uh mit is also one of the pioneers of the whole open source movement we even give away our courses for free right so for example with the machine learning tools we developed for this for classifying news they're already open sourced online if the goal with this is to improve the news so if other people take ideas from this and do things which also improve the news you know i say you know more power to them wow that's what the goal is here all right so but to have make an improvement all right so but suppose i choose to only get my news through this medium does this create sort of copyright problems fortunately not you know there are many news aggregators out there and you cannot if you go to google news for example you will also see apple news you'll see the headline and then the article you can click on it but now you come to the newspaper itself so it's them who is actually giving you the article that they have copyright on all right we got to take a quick break but when we come back i want to get in i want to get in under the hood of this and what what are the engines that are driving it what is the open source that you use and what did you add to it and i want to really find out how it works and whether in fact there can be some implicit bias even in this product that presents itself as unbiased so when we come back on star talk we're back star talk we got chuck nice here hey hey chuck you're tweeting a chuck nice comic still thank you sir i guess i don't plan on changing it very nice we're talking about a physicist reading the newspaper possibly revolutionizing how people um think about the news that they're presented with this product software basically it's a on a website and it's called uh next it's called improvement and there was improve the news and i got max tegmark old-time friend and colleague professor of physics up at mit so max this product allows you to to in real time with a slider see different news outlets treat the same topic through whatever lens they carry with them so so that's brilliant and you think you're sure people will do that that they will have a curiosity oh i wonder what they say about this you think people will do that or will they just still stay in their own stovepipe does this give them more tools to not have to listen to anybody else because they can lock it into place lock in i'm way right wing just move i'm moving my slider to the right and i'm gluing it there and now i'm going pro and that's it yeah locked in right be careful is this an unintended possible consequence i try to be humble about this so i'll be the first to acknowledge of course i don't know exactly how it will play out but i i feel pretty strongly i feel quite negative about this um very patronizing big brother mentality of saying i you neil cannot be trusted at all with your own choices i'm going to make them all for you and and in that case you know i shouldn't even let you walk on bridges because you might decide to jump off of it you know you shouldn't be allowed to do anything dangerous but in all fairness dare i even utter such a sentence to facebook and google they weren't thinking to themselves we can't trust you to make the decision this is the unforeseen byproduct of their business model yeah right and so not that they aren't blameless but it's not that they they weren't trying to play big bro i have a lot of friends at google and facebook very idealistic people i think they had not foreseen that the simple algorithm trying to maximize people's screen time would would create a very such a polarized society as we have now so how do you end up choosing the articles what's what let's open up the hood and see what kind of engine is there so how does this work so i just wrote a bunch of code which lives in the cloud which doesn't choose the article is just downloads vacuum cleans all the articles from from 100 different newspapers okay i don't have time to read 5 000 articles every day myself and figure out what they're about of course so for that we do some machine learning to actually go read each article and classify it now the machine learning that is used today in google and facebook and so on it mainly classifies you it says okay based on everything you clicked on we think that you're gonna the kind of guy who's likely to click on this article and this article um and then just add yeah the machine learning is there it's sort of big brother classifying the user and trying to manipulate the user into watching as many ads as possible here instead the machine learning is classifying the articles and giving you the opportunity to affect your choices so the way we did this under the hood was new york times once upon a time paid humans to read 1.4 million articles and classify what they were about into about 600 different categories a huge huge data set and then together with a bunch of mit students we trained the so-called artificial neural network to read through all this and replicate this human classification and learn just to be clear a neural network is a decision tree basically right that enables one bit of information to get you to one place and then branches depending on what forces are operating in that spot is that a fair way to characterize it it captures the gist of it and these have gotten better and better and and our brain is also a neural network a bunch of neurons connected together and it turns out that basically if you have a lot of data you can train these things to be quite good at figuring out whether the article is about golf or whether it's about immigration or something else and that's why we're immigrant golfers yeah each article can be classified into many classes so when you go through the news you can go click on any topic and you get all these sub topics and there's hundreds of them there so if you're really interested in golf you that's how you that's how it works that's why you only get to see golf articles then and then you can see the different spin the people put on golf as it were although honestly it's a lot more fun to look at controversial topics like immigration for example and move the sliders and see suddenly how differently the same event gets covered yeah so this is a this is a form of ai basically ai has become a bit of a marketing term people always want to call something ai if they want to sell it you can call it machine learning if you don't want to sound so lofty might be or lofty but yeah what happens is you take all the text from all these articles and you put them into your computer and it's in our case it classifies them in into what they're about and so on i happen to know separately that you are one of the world's experts and expositors of the multiverse and so now you got to fess up did this idea come to you because you spent so much time in the multiverse and then you looked at the media multiverse and you said let me bring those two together and let me is there some cause and effect here on this maybe there is a little bit because i i actually did catch myself complaining to me and my wife that people seem of different political stripes seem to have ended up in parallel universes now where they don't communicate anymore and i think that's very unhealthy look at how different that is from a science conference right you go to a science conference and there are these people who completely disagree with you who maybe think that your idea of galaxy information is rubbish or your interpretation of quantum mechanics is obviously stupid and they're still gonna go for drinks with you and they will respect you as a human being even though they don't think you're wrong right in fact max one of my most highly uh liked tweets was a very simple statement i was anyone who thinks scientists like agreeing with one another has never attended a scientific conference it's a very simple point because people say well scientist is the establishment and they're only protecting their cherished ideas we have the new age model here then we're being repressed and it's like and they don't they have to all agree i say no that's not how it works so i'm very i hate to sound like your father i'm proud of you for for taking scientific principles and saying maybe this can spill out into society i think there's so much more that can be done another cause and effect thing there of course is you know i just have this obsession always by looking at the bigger picture and then trying to take another step back and look at the still bigger picture so if i find myself in this country i love getting ever more dysfunctional i want to look at the bigger picture and say well why is that you know um it's not like the idea of biased media is new i mean there's a here in winchester massachusetts where i live there's a plaque this is the house of the first resident of winchester john converse lived and then it said underneath and he was thrown in jail for speaking disrespectfully of the king you know do you think he had great free speech then of course not the i'm sure the king had some pretty good bias and spin going on the newspapers there and and what so what's new there's always been people's incentive powerful people's incentive to spin things their own way what's new is exactly the machine learning stuff right that's what's happened in recent years where suddenly technology has greatly amplified the ability to create filter bubbles and probably okay so all you're doing so yeah so my idea was just okay let's take the same technology and use it for good because tech isn't evil all right you can use the technology of a knife to do bad things but also to make an awesome barbecue right same with machine learning let the machine learning work for the individual to see through the biasing attempts rather than leave it only to big corporations you know to manipulate you have you tested whether users do slide the bar to see the same new story covered multiple ways have you done some tests yeah not so much yet but i'm i'm very very interested in like it's brand new right this thing it's yeah it's brand new development so the most important thing actually for anyone who wants to try this is after you've messed with a bit go to the feedback form and send in suggestions for how to make it better because i have a lot of ideas and suggestions for taking other ideas from science scientific truth finding and building it on top of this and i'm actually very curious you you confessed neil which i was very honored to hear that you had actually wasted a lot of time yesterday playing with it what did you do what was your reaction yeah yeah so no it was like oh my gosh um because i like because as an educator i need i want to know i need to know how people are thinking otherwise i ca i have no access points to their to what's going on in their brain so i i i don't say that i relish in it but i see it as an obligation as a public educator to know what you're being fed in all parts of the political spectrum then when i come to you and have a conversation i'll have some insights into where you came from and what what what forms of bias you might be carrying and a sensitivity like you said you don't call someone an idiot you just you you offer ways they might be wrong but in a polite way and generally it's hard for them to be angry back at you if you come to them in a polite way but we're all polarized and everyone digs their heels in deeper when the fight begins and nothing nobody gets anywhere so i just spent time picking stories and oh that's it and i just just sliding back and forth that's all i did for like a half hour so so so the thing that strikes me here is the fact that um i am looking at two men who are brilliant scientists and that uh most likely will uh say that there there are there is such a thing as an objective truth okay um what do you do with the person who comes to this place and they are just steeped in their own confirmation bias and the only thing they're looking to do is reinforce that first of all i think it's very important to go in with humility and be honest about the fact that even though many people think that we scientists prove things and know the absolute truth that's our dirty little secret we never prove anything in science we just disprove things right we've spent hundreds of years thinking newton's gravity was the [ __ ] and then we realized oh it's not the [ __ ] it's a little bit wrong in fact very wrong when you get near black hole just to be clear the [ __ ] was used in a good context there right yeah yes you're not [ __ ] no it wasn't just [ __ ] yeah well no clearly clearly max knows a couple of black people because le that's that's black people talk that's yeah it's like yo i'm the [ __ ] but go ahead going with some humility and actually i think a lot of the fact checking that we're seeing now in the media which is causing a lot of controversy i think much of it comes the idea comes from a good place to create more truth but it's it's done in a very sloppy way which which sort of uh is not it's not at all as careful as what we do in science because in science if it were so easy to figure out the truth right that some committee for some company could just easily figure it out we could close science we would be done right the whole reason we still have science is because it's so hard to figure out the truth and sometimes we go for a long time with almost all scientists thinking oh this is the correct theory of gravity just later on to get be like oopsie we were kind of wrong about that so so when someone comes to me and says i don't believe what you're saying the first thing i think i want to do is be humble and say of course i don't know for a fact either but then we can make it into more of a joint exploration okay so let's look at the facts then look at the evidence together you know both none of us going into it with the axiom that the other one is wrong and idiot right now it's a joint search for truth which is a much more healthy perspective i think and it starts with what you said neil with trying to understand also where where the other person is you know i would never go to a country i've never been to before without googling them a little bit first finding out a bit about their traditions and how they think about things over there otherwise what kind of what kind of american are you you gotta go there and say how come you not do what americans do yeah and speak english we're gonna talk to someone who believes very differently the first thing i also want to do is just understand as neil said so beautifully there like what is their world what is it they've been told so so all right so let's let's um establish a landscape here so a person comes up to the app and they represent one extreme on the spectrum let's say because if in the middle they don't really need the app right it's really the people who are warring factions on opposite sides of a spectrum all right can i actually interject there i think we people we meaning that people like the three like the three of us who hang out a lot in our sort of intellectual university centered bubbles we can sometimes be a little bit arrogant and and say assume that the problem is not at all us it's just that all those fringe people are wrong but we have the complete truth i actually find it quite humbling to think about that many of my very smartest colleagues have also been very wrong about things like when when the iraq war the second one was about to happen most of my colleagues were quite convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq they believed it and they had read it in the new york times right and and yet we now know that that was just not correct right so i think nobody should assume that the problem is only with other people well no i'm so let me just for me the problem is not so much what the world looks like through your lens the problem is what the point you raised at the beginning yeah you feel so strongly about it that you are almost militarized in your attitudes regarding it and so my only point here is you um if we look at the two ends of the spectrum my question would be if i am one end of it will i be motivated to look at what others are saying on the other end yeah and the hope here the goal and it's in its infancy so i'd be delighted to see how this comes along is will people at least realize yeah that there are other perspectives out there yeah and maybe go out and have a beer and talk about those perspectives i certainly hope so einstein has this great quote that i put right that the greatest enemy of truth is blind belief and authority right so if you talk to someone who has a very strong belief about something it's interesting to ask what authority is it that they believe in blindly and then start poking about that a little bit that's good that's good okay so with that what about identity so what you just said there where if you have a very strong belief in authority if that authority has now grafted itself as a part of your identity for me to believe differently i now must deny my own identity that's the cult problem that's that's how you it's why it's so hard to get out of a cult that's very deep and and i s we've seen that in science also right if we must never get too so emotionally attached to our own scientific theories that we make them part of our identity it's like i am a flat earth guy or i am a geocentrist or whatever because then we start to become poor scientists once you start labeling labeling what you are then that boxes you in that's exactly right max exactly my wife maya likes to say we should keep our identity small which i think is very profound we should we should not make it part of our make our beliefs about all sorts of facts part of our identity let it be a flowing river that can move where it needs to in the face of evidence that emerges that's when you're a good scientist and and this thing about einstein saying we should always question authority you know feynman also used to stress that as being the core of being a scientist that everything it has to be open for questioning the ultimate authority to have the question of course is our own prejudices and you look now at some of the greatest breakthroughs in science like einstein for instance what was it that he did better than everybody else it wasn't that the math for example of special relativity was so hard that no one else could do it but he was the first person to just challenge this prejudice that everybody had the time flows at the same rate for everybody you know once you started questioning it it started unraveling and before long there you had it special relativity theory right so if einstein had access to your app he'd be even better so max this is where we part uh our third segment we're going to sort of bring in a journalism specialist to just think about and analyze what effect this might have on the landscape going forward was been a delight to have you on and this is just another chapter of the many chapters that occupy your very active uh and fascinating brain uh that we had the privilege to tap for star talk so thanks for being on uh chuck you're gonna hang around we've got another segment coming this is star talk the physicist reads the newspaper we'll be right back we're back star talk segment three of improving the news we're coming off of two segments with my friend and colleague max tegmark where he had told us about a new app that he wrote in fact that we interacted with it on the website uh improvethenews.org and it's an ai powered news aggregator where you can just slide what how conservative or liberal you want your news to be i just thought that was a fascinating take on what it is to aggregate news and so and and chuck you and i don't have particular expertise in this but we know someone who does jeff jarvis a friend of star talk you've been on multiple times jeff great to have you back i miss you guys oh yeah so you're professor of journalism at the city university of new york your director of the tau knight center for entrepreneurial journalism nice at the craig newmark school for journalism so oh wait it keeps going okay you're the leonardo that's enough okay [Laughter] now i have no time left to talk you're you you have a named professorship so that that t-o-w in the tao night you're the leonard tao professor of journalism gotta give give a shout out to those who endow these chairs and you have a blog buzzmachine.com and author from a few years ago let me read this here geeks bearing gifts imagining new futures for news well the world has changed quite a bit even since that book came out in 2014. so say welcome back to star talk i just want to get your your take on max's new tool have you had have you had a chance to check it out yeah i've had i've had time to play with it it's very cool i have two concerns but then i'm going to be very complimentary the first concern is i think that we in news have too often put people into binary buckets right left right white black 99 one percent four against and so i'm cautious about about things that that lack the nuance that is possible online for us to be in many different communities so jeff in that in that 99 1 we could have the 83 17 percent and the 64 36 percent and that's nuanced right it is it is well but then that leads to the second problem i have which is that basically there's i'll say this next to no responsible uh conservative media in the u.s we have one major outlet which is fox news which believe it or not and gallup is seen as the most trusted outlet in news why because there's one of them and then all the rest of us are liberal and i'm liberal and i think we have a lack of a decent conservative media i actually believe as a liberal media person that we should invest more in conservative media to provide competition to fox so the problem with the app there is it has very little to call upon that's responsible before it gets to oan on the right wow oh wow so all it has is what's out there and you're and so you you're not blaming the app you're blaming the world exactly that's really what you're blaming okay okay okay you're on the road wouldn't that be a reflection uh jeff of who we are as consumers i mean is it isn't this kind of an outworking or maybe it's like two mirrors facing one another where the outworking is this is what i want so this is what they do which makes me want it which makes them do it which makes me want more so you understand yeah it's okay it's a good question chuck and and it's an unanswerable one because of the chicken and egg question as to which came first uh the market that created it or the demand for that market i i think in this chicken egg problem does does have an answer and i'll tell you that i'm just saying i'm just saying it was the egg that came first uh it was just laid by a bird that was not a chicken so boy was that mother surprised yes and then you get the mutation that gets you the new bird which we call a chicken but but no but i want to finish your comments on the on the improve the news go so so but i do think there's something really important here which is in my view the internet so far has been built to speak and i celebrate that because we can finally hear black lives matter and me too and living well black and all these things that were not represented in mainstream mass media run by people who look like me old white men so that's i celebrate that speech immensely yes that also brings with us q online it's worth the price in my mind but the internet i want to see next the next phase of it is an internet that's built to listen and to tell us what and who are worth listening to that's where mac's app really impresses me because i think it starts to go to a next generation of the net where it says all right there's all this stuff out there some of it's good some of it's bad uh some of it looks in the world this way someone the world looks that way and i can help you find those things to give you a picture of the world so so back to your question chuck in a sense what max does when you go to the right on his slider is you get an anthropological view of what my father and my uncle are seeing now right on fox news and such uh it's worthwhile to that extent but i don't think it's what we want to have as a picture of a of a of a world it's not an accurate picture of the world gotcha so okay well wait wait wait wait no no wait wait wait if chuck to chuck's point if you they give you what you want and then you want what they give you what do you mean it's not accurate it is accurate if that's what people want and that's what we're being given what's how accurate about that i grew up right i grew up in a time where i the only choice i had was to watch uh gilligan's island and kids today may think that was fun but i can tell you it was hell it was the only choices we were given right and so the mass market that whole light well the internet kills is the mass market business model mass media and with it this idea of the mass this idea that there is one public and one view of the world that again walter cronkite one walter chris walter cronkite god bless him god rest him but that was bs that's the way the world was it was the way the world was for a certain number of people who had power right okay so it's a democratization of news yes i think that what's really happening today what i celebrate is the fact that we can all speak i'm researching a book on the gutenberg era and the end of it as i go back to the early days of print i saw that that that print was very conversational martin luther conversed through print with popes erasmus with thomas moore and so on we lost that conversation somewhere along along the line probably with steam power and mass scale and mass media and i think what's happening today is that we are re-learning as a society how to hold a conversation with ourselves interesting so let me ask you this then um how do we decipher between those who responsibly report and those who willingly obuscate for the purposes of profit i was watching how somebody's supposed to know if they don't if they're not you jeff how are they supposed to know that is difficult but that's where i think we have the opportunity to create new services i have a project going on now at the school which is trying to define quality and news i also think it's responsible for us in news to start cleaning our house we say to facebook and twitter clean your house well we haven't cleaned our own we journalists haven't stood up and said what we really think about fox news and rupert murdoch and it's time that we do something interesting well what about filter bubbles then because we find ourselves in a bubble we don't even know it actually actually professor uh the filter bubble is more of a myth than anything else there's a wonderful book i'll recommend by axel bruns who's a uh an academic in australia called are filter bubbles real his answer no no tons of research says short book okay well it's well well condensed um the research so just so we clear i'm just on the same page a filter bubble is what we think it is where you you're only reinforced with the information you want to believe is true and you don't know anything outside the bubble is that a fair characterization yes so what axel bruns does in his book is he goes through a lot of research that says the filter bubble theory it was a theory uh is not borne out by how google treats us google doesn't give us different googles for everybody else it's not borne out by our social behavior most people actually don't get rid of uncle joe who's miserable and rotten because he's still uncle joe and we still hear uncle joe's opinions and we're aware of them and so the filter bubble and the echo chamber don't really rule us and the problem becomes when we start to make those assumptions oh my god everybody's in a filter bubble or everybody doesn't know how media work we invent interventions that are not necessarily appropriate josh tucker who is a researcher at new york university did some great research where he looked at disinformation and said who's spreading this and is it our kids as we fear so we let's have let's have um media literacy for them no it's grandpa who's screwing up the world it's old men who again look like me who were spreading the disinformation in the world and my daughter told me exactly that she's 23. she said you guys are messing up the world not us and i said that she's right she's right damn right so what how did things get so polarized i don't i remembered yes you had warring factions of course that's not new in politics it just feels worse today so what caused that i think there's two answers you guys caused it media oh yeah that's that's the first answer is we did it we put everybody into binary buckets and set them at war with each other we are built in our business model for attention and conflict not for cooperation and collaboration but the second issue is i think we go back to the myth of walter cronkite it was only from the 50s until about the end of the century where we had this idea of of mass media and everybody watching the same thing before that going back to the beginning of newspapers in 1605 they represented many different viewpoints many different perspectives it was only when tv you guys killed the newspapers that we got to this idea of the monopoly having to serve everybody and we get then to very interestingly here is the myth of objectivity right so this idea of objectivity is that there's one view of the world a wesley lowry a former washington post reporter and pulitzer prize winner wrote an op-ed in the new york times a few months ago where he said objectivity is actually a construct of white racism in newsrooms because it is one more time people who look like me old white men who have the power who decide what is objective and what is biased and and so this idea that there was one view of the world from walter cronkite that was the same for everybody that served everybody equally was always a myth wow wow okay so what you're okay you're bumming me out here so what you're saying i know there's no no you are no no so what you're saying is there is no such let's imagine if if you will a newspaper where the first half is objectively verifiable information about the world and then the second half splits into how do you think about this objectively true information mr and mrs liberal person and mr and mrs conservative person and then you get outlooks on what is factually agreeable is that not possible i thought that was the new york times oh my god i'm so deceived now i will depress you i don't think facts are enough i don't think fact-checking is enough uh dana boyd who's a brilliant researcher in new york at data and society says that we are in an epistological war if i don't like you i don't like your experts they're elite like you and i don't like your facts so i'm just going to say things that peeve you for the sake of peeving you that's where we are we're in an epistemological war where perhaps what we need is not so much more education in facts but more education in each other how do we become more sympathetic empathetic understanding knowledgeable any of those about our fellow citizen situations how do we find common uh cause there you know i don't believe i i reread uh hannah iran's uh uh origins of totalitarian recently totalitarianism recently chuck just read that too he was telling yeah at the coffee lounge it's yeah it's it's so she said that um in totalitarian regimes people tend to give up their everyday concerns for abstract concepts right so think about america right now i don't believe that half of america thinks that guns and abortion are the single most important thing their lives every day no what's most important in their lives is the welfare and safety of their families that i share with them you share with them we all share that but media come in and pres my business and we present the world as if it's in conflict about these abstract notions and that's how the agenda of the discussion gets set and it's not very productive are you saying that if we were to take what is uh you know the venn diagram of america and we were to create more intersections where people have overlapping identities or the recognition of where their identities overlap that that acknowledgement alone would do more to bring us together than trying to convince somebody about a particular stance on an issue neil would you would nominate that man for a pulitzer prize or perhaps a nobel peace prize i think actually uh yes yes chuck exactly i think that's what we need we need to make strangers less strange we need to take away that power of the other we need to understand that we share more interest than we don't and media haven't done that i don't think they give us a very accurate view of the world as a result interesting now see as a comedian i hate everybody so now but everybody loves you that's how it works okay you got me all right so but suppose i have what i think of as a trusted source that i always go to don't people need a trusted source and it's yes it's a problem that people have different trusted sources but are you trying to abandon the entire concept of the go-to place to get the information upon which you base your world view no but i'm saying it's place ends it's plural and that's why the app is good because the app does expose you to other perspectives and other ways to see things the problem is some are good some are bad and your definition of good and my definition of good are going to vary but that's okay because that's what a democracy is you know i've really seen through my study about the early days of print that that society is a conversation and that what we have to do in media is to serve that conversation to make that conversation better yes more informed but also more respectful as chuck said and also productive so we can get somewhere and actually solve problems if someone is a particularly vociferous racist you can't tell me i just have to think more about where they're coming from and then i will understand their position there's certain non-starters in a conversation absolutely what does one do about that but i think what you do in that situation so the new york times tries to do this where they did they did a feature about a year ago on here's a racist he goes to panera just like you and me and he wears khaki pants right that normalizes that person that's no good that's what we have to do is understand their circumstances right we've got to understand where they come from so we can then see what to do now i wonder neil is whether journalism should look more like education look more like your fields where should we say here's a goal the goal is people should wear masks and they should get vaccinations and they should trust science and if they don't we've failed now does that make me an advocate i'm fine with that because you're an advocate for science and so should we be well here's another thing in science if i'm in a debate with you about something not entirely fully known in the universe one of three things is true either i'm right and you're wrong you're right and i'm wrong or we're both wrong but we can't both be right and we both go into that conversation knowing and understanding those three possible outcomes and in almost every case it's we need more data right so that we can then agree who is right and awesome and well we can still go out for a beer after we're not canceling each other the the difference is and we're not from my observation watching you guys debate one another is that you almost want your guy who to who's on the opposite side to be right if he can show you that you're wrong you're like cool you showed me i'm wrong now we can move on to the next thing whereas right now that's a culture that's a culture right but but but the way things are now if you show me that i'm wrong i dig in further and now you're a greater threat and now you have to die you know which is why which is why we need both science and humanities both are key we need education the answer to this is not one course one new app one different kind of news the answer to this as always damn it is education wow nice jeff always good to have you on we don't have you on enough i think i agree with that see we're both right here i agree with you so so you tweeting what what's your social media platforms here before twitter jeff jarvis medium jeffjarvis.medium.com excellent excellent so we can look for you and track your stuff and you're working on a book maybe when the book comes out you come here first and we'll talk about it i hope before so it's still taking a while but yes i'll come there okay we'll be we'll be we hope to be around right along with you all right chuck always good to have you on star talk always a pleasure i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist of course [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: 9M2CZlWq3zM

Length: 52min 37sec (3157 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021