There have been some interesting developments with NPR recently. A longtime veteran of the organization, Uri Berliner, wrote a essay lamenting that the organization has gone from an admittedly left-leaning, but still rigorous and fair, journalistic enterprise to a politically motivated monoculture that lets ideology drive its reporting. NPR, he says, no longer facilitates diversity of viewpoints or allows dissenting voices — leading NPR to suspend Berliner after he expressed his dissent. Berliner resigned shortly after.
Naturally, this has gotten a lot of attention, and people have recently started highlighting a TED talk given by Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR and former CEO of the WikiMedia Foundation – Wikipedia’s parent organization. In his TED talk, Maher made the following comment:
For our most difficult disagreements, seeking the truth and trying to convince others of the truth may not be the right place to start. In fact, our respect for the truth might be a distraction that keeps us from finding common ground and moving things forward.
There is obviously cause for concern when a leader of a large journalism organization fears that excessive respect for the truth is an obstacle to getting things done. But that aside, I think she’s completely wrong here. Seeking the truth and respecting it is the best chance we have of finding common ground. In fact, it may be the only way to achieve it.
A worldview opposed to the one she espouses has been described in an amusing book. video on the Veritasium YouTube channel, describing the history of how mathematicians calculated pi values and how Issac Newton revolutionized this process. (GOOD, I I think it’s a fun video either way – your mileage may vary!) At one point the discussion turns to Pascal’s Triangle and Derek Muller, the channel’s host, mentions how Pascal’s Triangle was discovered independently by several mathematicians at different times and from very disparate locations. Discussing this with math teacher Alex Kontorovich led to the following exchange after six minutes and twenty-five seconds:
Muller: What fascinated me when I started looking at these old documents is that even though I don’t speak these languages and I don’t know these number systems, it’s obvious, clear as day, that they all write. it’s the same thing we call today in the Western world Pascal’s Triangle.
Kontorovitch: That’s the beauty of mathematics! It transcends culture, it transcends time, it transcends humanity. It will exist long after we are gone, and ancient civilizations and extraterrestrial civilizations will all know about Pascal’s Triangle.
All of these mathematicians were able to converge on common ground despite different cultures and thousands of miles and centuries separating them, because they were all dedicated to determining what was TRUE. Now, it’s true that I made things easier by using a mathematical example. Things are much more difficult when it comes to more ideologically and emotionally charged issues such as religion or political ideology. But I agree with GE Moore that the difference is simply a matter of difficulty and not a matter of nature. Comparing the errors of moral reasoning to the errors of mathematical reasoning, Moore wrote:
If we see a gross and palpable error in the calculations, we are neither surprised nor troubled that the person who made the error arrived at a different result from ours. We think that he will recognize that his result is false if we point out his error to him. For example, if a man has to add 5 + 7 + 9, we should not be surprised that he obtained a result of 34, if he started by doing 5 + 7 = 25. And so in ethics, if we find: as we have done, that “desirable” is confused with “desired”, or that “end” is confused with “means”, we must not be disconcerted by the fact that those who have made these errors do not do not agree with us. The only difference is that in ethics, because of the complexity of its subject, it is much more difficult to persuade someone either that they have made a mistake or that that mistake affects their outcome.
But this added difficulty does not mean that we must abandon our attempts to seek the truth, nor does it mean that respect for the truth is a counterproductive distraction. This means that we must strongly emphasize respect for the truth as a necessary counterbalance to our personal flaws and prejudices in these areas. To see real-world examples of this, consider the idea of adversarial collaborations. The idea was promoted by Scott Alexander, as his description of a particular example of operation:
Let’s go back to that Nyhan & Reifler study that found fact-checking backfired. As I mentioned above, an attempted replication by Porter & Wood found otherwise. This could have resulted in violent conflict, with both groups trying to convince academics and the public that they were right, or even accusing the other of poor scientific practice.
Instead, something big happened. The four researchers decided to work together on an “adversarial collaboration” – a bigger and better study where they all contributed to the methodology and where they all independently verified the results. The collaboration found that fact-checking generally did not backfire in most cases. All four used their scientific influence to publicize the new findings and initiate further research into the role of different contexts and situations.
Instead of seeing the disagreement as a demonstration of the need to convey their own opinion more effectively, they saw it as a demonstration of a need to collaborate to investigate the issue together.
And yes, part of that was because they were all honest scientists who respected each other. But it wasn’t necessary. If one team had been a complete idiot and the other team was secretly making fun of them the whole time, the collaboration would still have worked. All it took was a good faith guess.
These seekers were able to find common ground precisely because of their desire to seek the truth and their respect for the truth. And if combating misinformation is one of the things you want to do, to do so effectively requires knowing, for example, whether fact-checking has the opposite effect. So, on both counts, Maher is wrong. The search for truth is what we should all be engaged in – journalists or otherwise.
