By Ray Dalio via Linkedin
As you know I believe that knowing what’s true is essential for good decision making, which is why I’m so keen on radical truthfulness and radical transparency. And as you probably know I also believe that the media is our largest source of information and it has truthfulness problems. It is for those reasons that I really like Facebook’s initiative to have its users rate the accuracy of media sources.
It is a reality that those who produce media have an unbalanced incentive to produce what excites people and sells, or they have their own agendas that they want to move forward. Because of the lack of regulation, they weren’t held accountable for accuracy. And, we don’t want regulation because we want a free media. So, the question is how to get more truthfulness in the media without regulating it.
Facebook’s move is an important step in the right direction. The mere act of asking people to think about the accuracy of what they are getting and to produce these Facebook ratings/metrics will make media accuracy a priority that will come without government intrusion in the media, which scares us all.
More importantly, these metrics will affect behavior and will evolve to become better and broader. Others will come up with their own measures of the accuracy of each medium. Of course they will be imperfect and probably politicized (e.g. those of the left will consider media from the right to be more inaccurate and visa versa) but that will nonetheless produce progress as the debate of how to measure and produce accuracy will be more top of mind and more and better metrics will exist, whereas now none of this exists and no meaningful assessments can be made. Well done Mark and
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