Trust in Transparency
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 12.4.25
66% of Americans are concerned about the credibility of news sources
58% of Americans distrust the media
50% of Americans believe democracy is losing its effectiveness as a form of government and that we are in the midst of a cold civil war
20% of American adults believe we must resort to violence to get the country back on track
These are the worrying results of the Edelman Trust Barometer and a PBS/NPR/Marist Poll as highlighted by Jimmy Wales in his recent book, The Seven Rules of Trust, written with Dan Gardner (who also co-authored Superforecasting).
The steady and drastic deterioration of trust since the 1970s has created one of the greatest existential threats to our current way of life. Reversing this trend is vital to avoiding violent conflict that risks derailing the course of human progress.
Rebuilding trust in each other requires us to communicate across ideological divides, but instead we construct our worldviews from within our own information silos. If we are unable to collaborate within a shared consensus reality, we will only stray further down the path of polarization.
It is clear that we must first solve the fundamental issues facing our information environments to begin bridging these divides. To accomplish this, we must rebuild trust in our sources of information.
One of Jimmy Wales’s seven rules is transparency — drawing back the curtain so everyone can understand how and why they receive the news they read. When there is nothing to hide, people can trust that there is nothing nefarious occurring behind the scenes and there is no outside influence over the media.
Yet, despite transparency being a core pillar of building and maintaining trust, many versions of “transparency” in media platforms still rely on faith.
For instance, X open-sourced their feed curation algorithm, but a major step of their process is an AI black box. Even if you have the technical expertise to read the open-source code, you still cannot get a full understanding of the process.
Wikipedia stores the full edit history of each article and editor, but the reputations of each editor follow no formal system but the qualitative judgement of other editors in the community.
These methods merely create the illusion of transparency, only surpassing a bar low enough to get people to assume good faith due to claimed openness. However, once you actually call these processes into question, you discover that no individual can accurately assess their credibility when they try to take a look.
We cannot settle for this being our threshold of transparency. Rather than relying on faith, Aemula relies on verifiability. Not only are our algorithms open source, they are human-readable. Anyone should be able to review our process for curating information and understand why they receive the articles they read. Reputations do not rely on qualitative judgements, but verifiable track records of credibility, immutably stored and publicly available onchain.
We believe in the power of a decentralized community creating high-quality, independent reporting across the entire spectrum of diverse ideologies. However, decentralization is only possible if everyone is able to participate fully in the process. Without true transparency and verifiability, many people simply assume good faith and remain on the sidelines. This is not trust, but an assumption — one we cannot afford to make if we wish to reverse the trend of collapsing trust we currently face in America.
This week, we diverge from our typical format to highlight a few of the books and authors that fill Aemula’s shelves. We will be sharing and compiling our reading list over the coming weeks so you can explore the works that have influenced the ideas behind Aemula.
The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last
By Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner
“Long before it became the biggest collection of knowledge in the history of the world, Wikipedia had to overcome its greatest challenge: getting strangers on the Internet to trust each other. They had to trust that others would not be abusive or uncivil. They had to trust that others would not unfairly change or erase their contributions. They had to trust that people had good intentions.
Trust, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says, is a treasure. But it is not inanimate, like gold or gems. Trust is a living thing that can and must be cultivated. This book will show you how. And it will reveal how his organization, this one-time punchline, has become a global authority—in the same two decades when the public’s trust in everything else, from government to social media, has trended backwards.”
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
By Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
“In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are ‘superforecasters.’
In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course.”
Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
By Renée DiResta
“Invisible Rulers is about a profound transformation in power and influence that is altering our politics, our local government, and even our relationships with friends and neighbors. Today, small communities of propagandists increasingly shape public opinion and even control our relationship to the truth. Our shared reality has splintered into discrete bespoke realities driven by algorithms, influencers, and curated content. Very little can bridge the divide, thereby making democratic consensus nearly impossible to achieve. Renée DiResta exposes how these propagandists and their followers undermine the institutions that make society work, from anti-vaccine zealots who flood social media with fringe viewpoints to influencers who use AI-generated images to manipulate our perception of reality. She also provides readers with a new conception of civics that helps us understand and fight back against these new invisible rulers.”
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!
Link your Substack to your Aemula account using this link or send a quick email to writers@aemula.com to get started!
No cost, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
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If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications.
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