Attention has quickly become our scarcest and most valuable resource, and filtering out noise is one of the most valuable services that can be provided. The no limits, "let the good in with the bad" approach is just not realistic at this point in human history.<p>Unfortunately, I don't think that sociologists are going to find the answer alone. It will take others who can engage the theory, but not become swept away in it.
What's most troubling is that Sam Altman is just the sort of person who might be able to add value to the situation by taking a complex issue and thinking really hard about how to deal with it. We need to develop nuanced mechanisms of combatting misinformation and filtering out truly impoverished arguments while letting in unusual, perhaps even incorrect, but potentially valuable ones. Instead he merely repeated dogma of a "marketplace of ideas" model of the world that is clearly inconsistent with the evidence all around us.<p>This is, at least in part, a technical problem. Zuckerberg seems to be waking up to the role of the failed marketplace of ideas in creating the political monstrosity that we are dealing with now. He seems to be at least thinking through how to deal with it. But it's going to require a lot more than one organization to figure out how to communication must change in an era where the value of talk is so much lower and the value of the attentional resources required to truly listen are so much higher.