The Importance of Salience

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Salience is, it's basically the importance weights when you're trying to apply knowledge to a real problem. The questions we ask and the things that are important to us along with like what we perceive as being valid or invalid makes up our salience frame. And I think when manipulation of people's viewpoints is happening, it's happening by not actually inserting false information, but it's just like lifting up one little piece of information in the salience frame so that people over weigh it. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely.

Read the full transcript here.

What is the New Enlightenment? What might it mean to improve our epistemics with regard to institutions? How should we fix imbalanced salience in contexts where misinformation is a problem (like news media)? How have the economics of institutions deteriorated? How can we continually reinvigorate systems so that they remain ungameable and resistant to runaway feedback loops? In the context of government in particular, how can we move away from "one dollar, one vote" and back towards "one person, one vote"? At what levels or layers should institutional interventions be applied? What can we do to increase trust across social differences and reduce contempt among groups? Under what conditions is it rational to feel contempt for an out-group? How can we make conflict and "dunking" less appealing, and make openmindedness and careful consideration more appealing? What is the "dismissal" economy? How can we deal with information overload? How might the adversarial economic model be used to improve academia?

Ashley Hodgson is an Associate Professor of Economics and a YouTuber. She teaches behavioral economics, digital industries, health care economics, and blockchain economics. Her YouTube channel, The New Enlightenment, explores topics related to economics, governance, and epistemics — that is, the determination of truth and validity — in a world of social media and increasing power concentration. She also has another YouTube channel with her economics lectures.

Staff