The Economics of Salience

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The science of salience would need to account for what are the human motivations that might make a salience imbalance a little bit more likely here? And in which case, maybe you need to bring in someone who would counterbalance that psychological thing onto the team of thinkers. So let's go on to the next piece of this, the economic piece. What do you mean when you say that kind of economic institutions or aspects of institutions have depreciated? Yeah, that's a good question. The systems thinking answer is systems work in ways where if something's going wrong, there's mechanisms for noticing that thing that went wrong and feedback loops that'll come in and fix it. But if you

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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.

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