We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread.
Doubt. This was certainly the intention but it's very plain that the market of public discourse doesn't work nearly as well as scientific peer review, which is itself somewhat flawed.
It's an old truism that 'a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.' It has also been rigorously documented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 For that matter, phrases like 'the big lie' reflect a wide social awareness that lying has historically been an effective political strategy.
Besides the fact that the marketplace of ideas demonstrably doesn't privilege truth in the short term, why would you expect it to? A marketplace is easily dominated by whoever can invest heavily in promotional tools. Furthermore, many people in the market demand entertainment or validation rather than truth, so there's abundant money to be made out of selling pleasant-sounding bullshit.
Doubt. This was certainly the intention but it's very plain that the market of public discourse doesn't work nearly as well as scientific peer review, which is itself somewhat flawed.
It's an old truism that 'a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.' It has also been rigorously documented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 For that matter, phrases like 'the big lie' reflect a wide social awareness that lying has historically been an effective political strategy.
Besides the fact that the marketplace of ideas demonstrably doesn't privilege truth in the short term, why would you expect it to? A marketplace is easily dominated by whoever can invest heavily in promotional tools. Furthermore, many people in the market demand entertainment or validation rather than truth, so there's abundant money to be made out of selling pleasant-sounding bullshit.