We tend to believe that we are more polarized than we actually are. We are surprised when events unfold differently than predicted by the media outlets we follow. Why does it feel as though we live in separate worlds? Why do our media narratives so often diverge from reality?
We can only make decisions, form opinions, and shape our worldview based on the information we consume. For anything we have not directly experienced, we must rely on others to relay that information to us. In today’s globally interconnected society, we typically receive this information from strangers, whether they are reporters at institutional publications or individuals posting to corporate social networks.
However, neither of these systems for relaying information are capable of rooting us in reality. We subscribe to editorialized voices that affirm our existing beliefs, and we cultivate “bespoke realities” within our social media feeds. While this may create an enjoyable experience, it limits our ability to truly understand the world around us. We attempt to process the complexities of current events through narrow funnels.
Instead, if we want to deepen our understanding and expand our worldview, we must increase the resolution of our information environment. To achieve this, we need to empower individuals with the liberty to write from their own perspectives, while giving readers the ability to explore new viewpoints in one cohesive ecosystem.
Aemula enables this through a verifiably neutral, censorship-resistant, decentralized publishing protocol while upholding journalistic integrity through robust moderation procedures and professional newsroom resources. This creates a system capable of breaking us out of our echo chambers so that we can see more clearly.
This week, we highlight writers who are confronting the problems that arise from our fragmented information silos. We encourage you to read their work and consider subscribing to support them directly.
Optimally Irrational
Written by Lionel Page, a professor of economics and a behavioral scientist with over 50 publications in economics and other behavioral sciences, arguing that many of the cognitive biases and puzzling behaviors discussed in the behavioral economics literature can be understood as good solutions to the problems we actually face in real life, with research covered by major media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, ABC, SBS, The Australian, and Der Spiegel.
“Why do people behave as they do? Why do they hold the beliefs they hold? And why does society work the way it does? Answers abound, yet they are often scattered across disciplines and rarely speak to one another. In this Substack, I extend the argument developed in Optimally Irrational (2022) to answer these many questions. The outlook is naturalistic: it explains human and social affairs as part of the natural reality, without calling on “skyhooks”—ad-hoc principles ungrounded in how the world actually works. Specifically, the perspective I develop here rests on the view that economics and game theory are the grammar of life.
This stance differs sharply from many dominant approaches in the social sciences and humanities, which, surprisingly often, rest on theoretical principles with scant empirical footing.”
Silver Bulletin
Written by Nate Silver, a statistician and renowned election forecaster, professional poker player, and author of The Signal and the Noise, previously featured in our spotlight “Fact-Checking”.
“Still, when something is an open secret to the extent Biden’s condition was among elites — to the point that many people close to him felt it jeopardized national security — you’d hope for the press to report on it more aggressively.
Instead, the press was engaged in a funny equilibrium on Biden’s age; until the debate, the constant attempts by Democrats to work the refs on the story may have been somewhat effective. Democratic partisans frequently criticized media execs like New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn for daring to cover the story at all, charging him with false equivalence for ignoring Trump-related storylines they saw as more important. Although Kahn sometimes ably pushed back on the critics, until the debate, Biden’s age was rarely the top story in the New York Times or elsewhere.2
Rather, some coverage endorsed the White House party line, particularly in its tendency to characterize claims about Biden’s acuity as “misinformation”. Republican videos that appeared to show Biden in a confused state were dismissed as “cheap fakes,” even though there had been little editing apart from using different camera angles and insiders like Clooney had witnessed exactly that sort of confusion when seeing Biden in person.”
Yascha Mounk
Written by Yascha Mounk, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persuasion, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of five books, including The People versus Democracy, The Great Experiment (which was included by Barack Obama on his list of recommended books) and The Identity Trap (which was featured as one of the best books of 2023 in The Economist and the Financial Times, among others).
“Too much of what’s published in the media chases the news cycle or serves a narrow partisan agenda. The incentive for journalists worried about clicks is always to dunk on the other side or to stake out some provocative position in yesterday’s social media beef.
This is a space for breaking away from that impulse, and thinking deeper. A place for essays about the things that really matter. A home for conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers. A space to experiment with ideas. In short, my—our—little cabin in the webs.”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to:
Instantly increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Cross-posting comes with no costs, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
Just send a quick email writers@aemula.com to get started!
The Aemula platform is live at aemula.com! Claim your 1-month free trial today! All it takes is an email address and 30 seconds — learn more about creating an Aemula account here.
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications. If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, we offer both paid and free subscriptions for you to stay informed!
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