In 2020 I began paying attention to news and politics for the first time.
Before then, they’d both seemed distant and irrelevant to my day-to-day life. But in 2020 I realized how uninformed I was, and that it mattered.
I began trying to learn as quickly as I could, and through the process I became aware of how difficult it was to figure out what was true, even if you approached it as an educated critical thinker. There was just so much information out there. A lot of it was wrong, but it took a good deal of digging to figure that out.
It was easy to get caught in information bubbles without even realizing it.
In 2021, I started a publication called 2ndLook News that did long-form deep dives into controversial topics. All sources were cited and we'd put each article through a peer review process (including review by experts, as well as regular people from different perspectives) before publication.
The idea was that everyone is inherently biased, and doesn’t know what they don’t know. To counteract this, we can bring our different perspectives together to “triangulate reality,” helping us move closer to objective Truth.
All of the sources in 2ndLook articles were cited with links, because we needed to know why each perspective thought what they thought—what information were they seeing that prompted them to form their opinions?
In our aim to be unbiased, at times we included information that even the writers and editors and myself disagreed with. This is not to say that Truth is subjective and all perspectives are equal—rather, we believed that our job as journalists was to steel man, critique, and integrate as many perspectives as we could, so that our readers could do the process of drawing the conclusions for themselves.
2ndLook was based on an acknowledgment that the human attempt to know Truth will always be imperfect, and a respect for each person’s right to make sense of things for themselves despite that.
The goal was to present a fuller body of evidence with more context for people to base their conclusions on than what we typically get from news and social media today.
I think the content we produced was really unique—not perfect, but definitely some of the most nuanced sensemaking articles I've seen.
Hidden beneath the talking points of most politicized topics, there are often shared values. We tried to refocus the conversation on that level. If you can realize that you and your supposed enemy both care about the same things, then you can discuss your solutions in terms of why you think your ideas are more likely to lead to the outcome you both want. This is productive political discourse.
2ndLook produced some powerful and informative content, but the top-down approach, while valuable for maintaining high quality standards, was slow, expensive, and inefficient. Plus, however many peer reviewers we had look over each article, I inevitably felt like we were still missing things.
I began thinking of how to accomplish the same goals more effectively.
That's how I came up with Project Qrio, a system that curious people can use to make sense of the world together.
I designed it for people like myself who want to understand those who think differently from themselves, organize their own reasoning, change each others' minds through the process of exploring truth together, and receive crowdsourced fact checking on information that is shaping their own perspectives.
In other words, it's a system for people to sharpen each others' thinking.
I drew up the first designs back in 2022, and spent a year trying to figure out how to make it a reality. It wasn't until the summer of 2023 that I finally bit the bullet and started learning how to code it myself, using ChatGPT and a uDemy course.
So here we are.
I'm starting this Substack to share the lessons from my experience running 2ndLook for over two years, as well as my observations as a researcher with a background in anthropology, things I've learned from other thought leaders on this topic, and how this has all culminated in the ideas behind Qrio. I hope what I share will be useful for others who are interested in this space, and welcome constructive feedback and ideas.
I look forward to digging into these topics and many more. My public posts will be the more polished thoughts that I hope will be useful for a broad audience, while the paywalled posts will be my more introspective, outside-the-box explorations.
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In all things, I aim to make an impact. Knowing that what I’m putting out there is useful and wanted makes a huge difference.
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