The Search for a Fair Society: Journalism (1)

November 1. Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit. The superstition for this month out of the way, grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society because it’s the only chance we go to banish violence and war from our lives.

This will be my first but certainly not last dive into the question of journalism in a fair society made up of humans who partially align their self-generated models of the world with the intention to offset the insurmountable risk that random searches pose for an individual by cooperating. The partial alignment is achieved by all cooperators replacing some data that they’d chosen themselves to put into their models of the world to make it the best fit for their personal circumstances with a shared dataset which contain all the motivations, goals, rules and structures that govern their cooperation. In a fair society, the maintenance and update of the replacement dataset is a right and duty of every cooperator, with the voice of each of them having the same weight. This goes back to the fact that each cooperator individually must implement the replacement dataset to its full extent into their world generation processes. It’s an action that requires agreement.

Agreement is reached by keeping the replacement dataset clean of any provisions that are not necessary to achieve the shared goals of the cooperation while delivering toward the shared motivations even for the least advantaged and by convincing each other/ allowing oneself to be convinced of updates to the replacement dataset as the individual models of the cooperators evolve due to data gathered in the random searches.

The ground set, the first thing to say about journalism in any society is that we must not act as if there’s a single reality that can be objectively covered by everyone alike. As every human being generates their own models of the world, one at the time in quick succession based on what was already there, there exist as many realities as there exist conscious humans. Journalists aren’t exempt from that; they aren’t given a secret access to the one true reality along with their press credentials.

Even where it seems like a journalist is simply sticking to facts, the way the human mind works, we are only open to understand and reason about what our body and brain allow. A shattered model of the world requires a resource-intensive rebuild while we are flying blindly. Thus, unless it’s unavoidable because our existing model of the world is so flawed that it represents a grave danger in and of itself, any incoming data that would knock all the hypotheticals our existing model is made up of, on the head, will not compute. They will not make their way into the model which represents reality to us.

So, it is of utter importance to understand and remind oneself repeatedly that everyone will only report anything in the limits of their reality while we absorb their reports in the limits of our reality. It’s in the challenge to find the limits of our model and to push against them that we improve it change by tiny change. The questions we ask, that’s a random search only cooperation enables the individual to engage in. A journalist is therefore the personification of what we seek in cooperation – the random search.

This entails a warning. Random searches pose an insurmountable risk to the individual because of their high rate of failure to produce what is immediately useable. Their high payoff is generated in numbers – many reports from diverse viewpoints.

To be continued. Any thoughts so far? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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