Mrs. Postrel - Difficult topic. Great job. Have you considered writing a similar article, not for news but for education? Particularly, bias as a selling point in higher education. (Though we should consider bias as a selling point for primary and secondary education too, I think starting with higher education is more timely). We view bias as a selling point for religion and churches. Right? Why not for education? See this Econtalk discussion on dogma, where Russ Roberts mentions that dogma is viewed as a good thing; a positive feature of religion. https://www.econtalk.org/sam-harris-on-meditation-mindfulness-and-morality/
Follow this line of thinking a bit further and we might ask, “What are the similarities and differences between education and religion in the context of the First Amendment?” I discuss this question in my post, “MLK Jr. on Academic Freedom.”
And this morning I posted an article called, “How to Choose a College?” which describes a currently available bias metric for choosing a college to attend. My method assumes prospective students have a bias and are either looking for: 1) a biased education, which we might refer to as “religious education” in the most general sense, including political bias, DEI religion, etc; or 2) for a even-handed education (which we might call truth seeking). The subtitle of my post is “Reliable Metrics for Predicting Campus Discourse and Making Friends in College.” The main point of the article is to use FIRE’s viewpoint ratio as a metric to aid in college selection; bias is a feature for some and a bug for others.
Ideally one would not want an entire four years of college filled with a predominant political bias. It would be better to discretize with finer resolution; say exploring various biases on a month-to-month time frame, or class-to-class interval, or a book-to-book resolution. And better yet, let’s consider education biases in new models of education: Substack being my favorite. Here’s a Dan Williams post that went up this morning that I consider groundbreaking. It feels like an “invitational lecture” to an introductory philosophy of science class offered over Substack.
If we take this even further we might ask “How can we improve discourse on Substack?” How can we incorporate this bias feature (also called religion) into a Next Gen Substack? For example, if Substack can improve its comment sorting algorithm, we can showcase the best work and best comments, not simply based on like or null, but rather on biased metrics such as concise, funny, poetic, etc. These “Biased Best Work Boards” would have various built-in biases. I describe this in a post/comment on Arnold Kling’s blog that I wrote this past Monday called “Discourse Platforms: A Comment on Social Media, Higher Education, Virtuous Leadership and Lifelong Learning.” This seems like the future of higher education to me.
Mrs. Postrel - Difficult topic. Great job. Have you considered writing a similar article, not for news but for education? Particularly, bias as a selling point in higher education. (Though we should consider bias as a selling point for primary and secondary education too, I think starting with higher education is more timely). We view bias as a selling point for religion and churches. Right? Why not for education? See this Econtalk discussion on dogma, where Russ Roberts mentions that dogma is viewed as a good thing; a positive feature of religion. https://www.econtalk.org/sam-harris-on-meditation-mindfulness-and-morality/
Follow this line of thinking a bit further and we might ask, “What are the similarities and differences between education and religion in the context of the First Amendment?” I discuss this question in my post, “MLK Jr. on Academic Freedom.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/scottgibb/p/mlk-jr-on-academic-freedom?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
And this morning I posted an article called, “How to Choose a College?” which describes a currently available bias metric for choosing a college to attend. My method assumes prospective students have a bias and are either looking for: 1) a biased education, which we might refer to as “religious education” in the most general sense, including political bias, DEI religion, etc; or 2) for a even-handed education (which we might call truth seeking). The subtitle of my post is “Reliable Metrics for Predicting Campus Discourse and Making Friends in College.” The main point of the article is to use FIRE’s viewpoint ratio as a metric to aid in college selection; bias is a feature for some and a bug for others.
https://open.substack.com/pub/scottgibb/p/how-to-choose-a-college?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Ideally one would not want an entire four years of college filled with a predominant political bias. It would be better to discretize with finer resolution; say exploring various biases on a month-to-month time frame, or class-to-class interval, or a book-to-book resolution. And better yet, let’s consider education biases in new models of education: Substack being my favorite. Here’s a Dan Williams post that went up this morning that I consider groundbreaking. It feels like an “invitational lecture” to an introductory philosophy of science class offered over Substack.
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/hawking-was-wrong-philosophy-is-not?r=nb3bl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
If we take this even further we might ask “How can we improve discourse on Substack?” How can we incorporate this bias feature (also called religion) into a Next Gen Substack? For example, if Substack can improve its comment sorting algorithm, we can showcase the best work and best comments, not simply based on like or null, but rather on biased metrics such as concise, funny, poetic, etc. These “Biased Best Work Boards” would have various built-in biases. I describe this in a post/comment on Arnold Kling’s blog that I wrote this past Monday called “Discourse Platforms: A Comment on Social Media, Higher Education, Virtuous Leadership and Lifelong Learning.” This seems like the future of higher education to me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/scottgibb/p/discourse-platforms?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
And I would be delighted if you stole any of my ideas. My Substack is called “Trim to Truth” for a reason, but I like bias too.
Thank you.
Scott