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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   32107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Who said you have to have "utilon maximization as a terminal value"? This is a basic element of any societal critique. "Here's what's bad... and here's a better alternative". Without the better alternative you can often just make a bad thing worse, like how the right has spiralled into being the party of Catturd.

Part-time youtubers are literally better than the mainstream media.

Random content creators are so much worse than say the NYT. The worst youtubers or substackers or whatever are so, so much more awful than the worst NYT columnists in terms of bias and adherence to truth. The best content creators can be about on par with the best NYT has to offer when it comes to op-eds and analysis, but they have big blind spots when it comes to reporting original facts in many places.

Who said you have to have "utilon maximization as a terminal value"? This is a basic element of any societal critique. "Here's what's bad... and here's a better alternative". Without the better alternative you can often just make a bad thing worse

If supposed public servants refuse to do what the public asks of them, things getting worse on other axes might be an acceptable cost for forcing them to do what you want. Like, I don't care if you're objectively a superior cook, if you're going to prepare meals I don't like, or even feed me poison.

like how the right has spiralled into being the party of Catturd.

Ah yes, so much worse than being the party of elective double mastectomies for adolescent girls.

Random content creators are so much worse than say the NYT.

Your original claim was that there is no superior replacent for mainstream media, not that the NYT will on average outperform a random youtuber. The former seems straightforwardly false, as it's pretty trivial for me to find superior analysis than even that of the NYT, which is usually done at a fraction of the budget, and often part time. This should not be possible if your original claim were true.

The latter claim might be true, but it's a pretty clear case of moving the goalposts.

Your original claim was that there is no replacent for mainstream media, not that the NYT on will on average outperform an random you tuber. The former seems straightforwardly false, as it's pretty trivial for me to find superior analysis than even that of the NYT, which is usually done at a fraction of the budget, and often part time. This should not be possible if your original claim were true.

I agree with this, as someone whose media consumption has shifted from mainstream to YouTube quite a bit over the past decade or so. But my perception so far is that, in terms of actual news, i.e. getting journalists to the physical locations where things are actually happening in order to record them and then report on them, the mainstream media still dominates, by far. The kind of funding and infrastructure necessary to do that at a large scale is probably still out of the reach of most small organizations.

But maybe I'm wrong, and the YouTube algorithm just hasn't presented it to me? Which presents another weakness in this new media ecosystem; I can pick up the NYT and get news about Ukraine, Gaza, Washington, and Mars all in one place, whereas on YouTube, I'd have to actually seek out niches, each with its own set of producers and levels of credibility.

But my perception so far is that, in terms of actual news, i.e. getting journalists to the physical locations where things are actually happening in order to record them and then report on them.

A few years ago I would have begrudgingly conceded this, but between news not being all that relevant for me anymore (I know it might sound weird, but for an extreme case consider the case of pop-culture commentary channels regurgitating news taken from mainstream media, which, for all their faults, have superior access to the industry, but have lost any advantage stemming from that due to the entertainment industry failing to create anything I'd care about for many years now), and a lot of modern journalism being done by spamming FOIAs, I'm not sure this is true either anymore.

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