Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”

Let me put it to you this way. Everyone knows that salicylic acid (originally derived from willow bark) is a precursor to aspirin that is effective as a pain killer, fever reducer, and anti-inflammatory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salicylic_acid and https://www.ehs.com/2015/07/salicylic-acid-safety-tips-hazar...

But salicylic acid is also used in skin care products like wart remover.

Here's a wart remover product for dogs and horses, which contains salicylic acid as an active ingredient: https://www.chewy.com/creative-science-wartsoff-wart-dog/dp/...

If, the next time you have a fever, you reach for the dog/horse wart remover... I'm gonna call that "dog wart remover" regardless of the fact that it contains an ingredient that is used to treat fevers in _humans_

We're only split 50/50 on issues, and things are issues because we are split 50/50. If a large majority of people agree on both what to do and how to do it, we just do that.

You don't exactly need a poll for "issues" like should we legalize necrophilia or should we go to war with Australia.

> I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that,

It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world.

I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.

I'm 100% with your premise. When I first got exposure to the world of blogs, I had to quickly learn the skill of rejecting the parts of a piece that are ill-supported while pulling insight from the well-considered[1] parts. This doesn't just extend to rejecting inferences, but to spot-checking facts: studies are not that hard to skim, and important topics will usually have multiple analyses out there that disagree with each other.

But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference.

However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias.

[1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.

The fundamental rule is to double check everything. Otherwise you end up letting false stories through that confirm your preexisting biases, since they don't sound "absurd" to you.

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.