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Lumifer comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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This looks like the classic grey fallacy.
Looks like, but isn't. The goal isn't that you take one viewpoint and take another viewpoint and find "something in the middle"; the point is that having multiple independent viewpoints makes it easier to spot mistakes in each.
It feels natural for us to think critically when our preconceptions are contradicted and to accept information uncritically when our preconceptions are supported. If you want to improve the odds that you're reading critical thought about any given topic, you need sources with a wide range of different preconceptions.
I agree and wouldn't have objected if Prismattic advised to read multiple sources from a variety of viewpoints. As it is, he just said "you need to read progressives as well" and that's a different claim.
I'm not arguing that the views should be averaged, but that the combined sample of news stories will be less likely to suffer from politically motivated selection bias. A libertarian/fusionist source is likely to devote more coverage to, say, stories of government corruption and less to stories of corporate wage theft or environmental degradation; a progressive source to do the opposite. All of those stories might be important (in general or to sixes-and-sevens in particular), so the combined news feed is in that sense better.
So why did you recommend progressives and not, say, news coming from the Roman Catholic Church, from marxists, from PETA, from infowars, from Al-Jazira, etc. etc.?
Well, taking those specific examples as non-rhetorical: PETA, the Catholic Church, and Infowars are various kinds of insane in ways that extend beyond ordinary political mindkilling, so I'd be unlikely to recommend them. Al-Jazeera English is actually pretty good as a news source, but its website is an adjunct of being a broadcast news source, which is less helpful from a time-investment perspective. I predict that a center-left news source will provide coverage on a broader range of issues than a far-left news source, but your mileage may vary.
The center-left source is also most likely to compensate specifically for the coverage holes in a center-right source. That still isn't averaging their factual claims.
You're not averaging factual claims, you're averaging exposure to viewpoints.
I would argue that this summing, not averaging exposure. There's a difference between saying "You should read both GreenNetNews and BlueCast" and saying "To save time, read GreenNetNews on odd-numbered days and BlueCast on even-numbered days".
I think it's averaging because your capacity to absorb news/viewpoints is limited.