Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…One other thing that was, I think, nice to see working then was, one criticism of Community Notes some people bring up is, well if you always need agreement from people who typically disagree, then in these super polarized settings, that conflict being probably number one, then you wouldn't see any notes. But actually the reality was there were tons of notes about that conflict. So I think there was this kind of nice property where actually, and maybe this is a surprising fact, that there's more agreement out there across polarized divides than maybe conventional wisdom says, and the places where people agreed were really objectively true and verifiable. I guess maybe this is more true the more polarized the setting is, but where the agreement actually lends you, and basically notes that are very neutrally written, very focused on the facts and easy to verify information. There's this talk for a while of just there's no more facts, nobody believes there is a single true fact anymore, everything is subjective, and I think Community Notes proves the opposite. Facts matter, there are facts that we can all agree with even on the most controversial topics. Yeah, we saw this really from day one, when we would show those prototypes to people just depicting the idea, it was really obvious that people cared more about, or they cared a lot about understanding reality and what was going on and they were willing to disagree with their side, so to speak, to recognize that. And I think that's not always that obvious to people. The world does feel really polarized, but people definitely are willing to cross partisan boundaries to get to accurate information and that's why the product works.…

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