to paraphrase the post for others: institutional positions like "director of the CDC" or "the website that always shows up first when searching for medical stuff" are subject to systemic (largely cultural) pressures that influence them to publish information that is not just straightforward truth.

Thought provoking and certainly true in it's central conceit as a piece - I do wish more people spent the time to think in terms of systems dynamics. It's such an incredibly bright flashlight in the dark closet that is the complexity of the current information landscape.

I would like to add what I feel is a missing part of the analysis, though - the problem of centralization. One of the primary factors compounding the social effects that article describes.

It's like we've forgotten what the early Internet was and what made it great - it was a patchwork of lovely, golden inefficiency that meant that no matter how wrong you were, only so many people would be exposed to that wrong so it really didn't matter so much. Like we take for granted that there's "the one search engine", "the one social media platform", "the one medical site" et al.

I extend this thinking to our pre-Internet institutions as well - the larger and more centralized and older an institution gets, the more rot it's subject to. Efficiency doesn't just accelerate the good stuff - it accelerates every outcome of the process.

Banks 'too big to fail' broadcast economic crises to every corner. Highly liquid markets and scalable financial products accelerate recursive processes towards that failure.

Monolithic news networks and social platforms bind information signals together so that the loudest (not necessarily the most true) have the furthest reach, which recurses to a fever pitch. This process is accelerated by the efficiency of information gathering that is googling.

It feels like what's needed is a refragmenting of our systems in general - a dissolution of large, tightly bound systems into disparate, inefficient clusters that slow the churn and isolate components from toxic vectors.. but that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths.

> ... think in terms of systems dynamics

I think the main problem is that we lack better tools to communicate (and simulate) those systems. The existing ones are hard to use or require technical knowledge. And without them, we can only tackle very simple problems, our minds are not limitless.

For example, multiple times I've had a system design in my head, which I was convinced I knew how it worked, until I tried to express it in details in english, or code it.