Vibe reality, news, and LA protests

Published 2025-06-11

tag(s): #politics #failures

In the US, there's a lot going on right now, in particular with the LA protests and all happenings related. And it is so hard to know what's really going on.

Social media was supposed to be this amplifier of truth: what's real, that will survive among the cacophony of hundreds of thousands of voices.
Yet, the system is broken, because it doesn't survive the influence of mob mentality. People sharing, retweeting, upvoting whatever narrative agrees with how they feel, instead of addressing the fact that maybe what they were told was a lie.
I am not even concerned with bots in this, or malicious agents. I worry a lot more about real people, spreading whatever they see as an impulsive act.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness

That's a quote from "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan (emphasis is mine). Just checked the publishing date: 1995. No further comment.

And then we have the media. Whenever I try to find out more in the news, I am exposed to these heavily sensationalized headlines. Sometimes you can tell it is the same "fact" exposed in different ways.
Other times it is news organizations giving a voice to only certain opinions, to the detriment of having balanced perspectives.

And again, this wasn't how it was supposed to go. Being a reporter was seen as something prideful, being above your own biases, and observing things from all possible angles.
That has been replaced by being a marketing tool for whoever is ready to either pay, or to further your own agenda.

Vibe reality

There's a parallel with "vibe coding". I understand it is the practice of asking an IA for code that does something, without really knowing how to write software.
In such scenario, correctness becomes a secondary concern. Because you only care about fulfilling your request in a way that satisfies your perception of a problem - you might end up accepting a "bad" solution, as long as you think it is "good".

I see the online echo chambers and rejection of anything contrary to your worldview as "fake news" as trying to vibe reality, if you will.
Twisting and molding facts (which is by definition impossible), prompting and searching until you find a "good reality", without ever challenging yourself or questioning you arrived to your "solution" - Did I have to discard tens of opposing opinions and headlines? doesn't matter, because now I have what I wanted..

A closing observation

Related to the Sagan quote. In the same book he argues that the scientific method is unique in that it has a built-in mechanism for corrections when exposed to new information. And also that it accounts for revisiting our earlier assumptions and looking at them in a new light.

Maybe we are onto something with that idea...maybe human fallibility, and vulnerability to manipulation, should be front and center in many of the subjects we teach our kids in schools.
They need to be better equipped for critical thinking than we are.


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