This is a post about how we do news in 2016. But first a couple of stories about math and computer science.

I was a math major at Tulane University in New Orleans in the early 70s.

I remember once, a professor standing in front of a math class, probably differential equations or analysis, and he was angry.

He said "You're supposed to know when you have a proof," he said.

In other words, everyone in the class had turned in an assignment, which was to prove something mathematical and we had all turned in proofs that didn't work.

Something similar happened a few years later when I was a computer science graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. I was a teaching assistant then, and one of my jobs was to post example code for the students to use in their assignments. I had posted code that included a syntax error. It wouldn't make it through the C compiler. It would kick it back and say "fix this error and try again" or something like that.

A grad student who supervised my work got angry with me the same way the professor at Tulane had. "Check your work!" she said. I was both embarrassed, and got the message. Ever since, before posting any code, I run it through the system to make sure it does what I think it does. And of course a lot of errors get caught that way.

Okay, so how is this about news.

We don't have anything remotely like the answer to how news works in the age of the Internet. We're running around in circles, confused, ineffective, and all the while we need a good news system. Evidence: the way we're making political decisions. Also: we've going in reverse on race equality.

Try an exercise.

Get informed.

You can't. All you get is sensation. Feelings. Pushes in this primal direction or another. Fear dominates. The people who do what we call news know how this works and they make fear. And that's a rush and it feels good, but what about when you really just want to know what's happening?

Facebook doesn't do that. Nor does Twitter. Facebook sounded like they were going to do something in this area, but they punted. And I think they're not ready for what happened in Minneapolis last week, when their Live service was used to broadcast the aftermath of a murder. They probably thought they'd get movies of cats, skateboarders, and people dumping ice buckets on each others' heads.

This myth that young people get the future just because they're young is bullshit. Zuck doesn't know. And he's not all that young anymore, btw (sorry a little schadenfreud slipped in there).