Kind of a non-sequitor, but there is one specific tool that has helped me break out of my smartphone addiction: books! The process is simple:
1. Leave phone somewhere not in my pocket and not within reach
2. Always have a book handy in my free time.
At least in my case, reaching for and reading my phone happens pre-cognition. It's completely automatic. I've found that I enjoy reading just as much, but unless I plan for it I don't have a book in reach. So the solution has been pretty simple: keep a book in reach!
>In the case of sources that we cannot verify, [general suspicion] is indeed advisable. Conversely, however, we should also consider in a positive sense who we can trust. Especially here in Europe, there are many trustworthy media and institutions: the public broadcasters or the major daily newspapers.
I don't really like how this is said as if it is 100% true, like "trustworthy media and institutions" are things you shouldn't be generally suspicious of.
I'm not a fan of this either. In addition to what you've said, it ignores that one reason these 'alternative' sites have been so successful is that they often are good at pointing out the mistakes and misleading nature of mainstream institutions. That's often how they grow an initial trusting audience to begin with, and why they can so successfully bang the drum of 'don't trust the mainstream media': Often that media isn't trustworthy.
My go to is how the mainstream media treated the war in Iraq when it was started. Of course Iraq has WMDs; the President says so. The only counter examples I found at the time were from online orgs and discussions back before those were as prominent.
"Just trust us" isn't a good reaction to the current problem. If some institution wants to be trusted, they have to actually be trustworthy, but that takes $$ and effort. Which is not supported in the current landscape.
It's been remarkable how people have gone from "the press were far too credulous towards US government statements" to "I will get my news from Russia Today (or any number of even less credible places)".
I don't really know what the solution is. There are plenty of sources, media and individuals, who can be quickly written off as propaganda, nonsense, or chronic liars. But that can leave you with the more respectable media simply omitting stuff they don't like; they never have to lie about anything, just not mention it.
I don't know what the answer is either and it scares me.
I'm about as well armed as a person can be when it comes to being able to suss out what I'm being told: I've been online for 30 years (and thus understand how information spreads online and how digital communities work), I have an MLIS (understand how news and information was transmitted historically + how most citizens are taught [or not] media literacy + I understand things like the replication crisis in the sciences), I was raised by an accountant (I'm economically literate/understand financial incentives), and I've worked in nonpartisan political/civics communication (I'm aware of what every side is saying or can get that info in ~5-10 minutes). I can even read multiple other languages - French, Arabic, and Mandarin - so I'm not limited to the anglosphere for my information.
I still have low confidence in almost everything I'm told, and doing proper investigations into all of it is excessively time consuming, terrible for my mental health, and frequently impossible/difficult without institutional affiliation for things like being able to read primary academic sources that are being reported on.
How is the average person supposed to navigate this? There's literally no way.
TBH I think the answer is really quite simple and also fairly nihilistic: It's incredibly unlikely that you will personally be able to find the full truth in anything, even wildly important things like the justification of a war.
At the same time, the reason why the war justification is so notable is because it was eventually brought to light, and its unusualness of the lie made it notable enough for reporters to believe people need to hear about it.
It makes sense to me to generally conclude: liars happen, but generally dishonesty isn't something that's considered moral/ethical by society. Most people don't bald-faced lie about stuff, when they do its considered a scandal. Generally people will honestly tell some truth of what they understand from their own incomplete knowledge and that's about as good as you're going to get (there is no "objective truth").
Trustworthiness then becomes people who knowingly lie less often relative to others, or people who source their truths less often from known liars. For example, I don't believe Alex Jones on much of anything given that he's knowingly lied repeatedly, extensively, and built his career on it. But Joe Rogan I'm pretty sure just sources from liars more often than I'd like in his claims, so I don't really listen to him either. I'm more likely to believe the Slate Star Codex guy, because I don't think he knowingly lies about his analysis but he has his own biases and blindspots and so I generally don't believe what he concludes when he says things that correspond to his blindspots.
> It makes sense to me to generally conclude: liars happen, but generally dishonesty isn't something that's considered moral/ethical by society. Most people don't bald-faced lie about stuff, when they do its considered a scandal. Generally people will honestly tell some truth of what they understand from their own incomplete knowledge and that's about as good as you're going to get (there is no "objective truth").
I disagree with this, which is why I'm so freaked out. I would have agreed with this 20-25 years ago, but not now.
For example, re: your last paragraph, I'm also from a purple district in a purple state with family equally split between the left and the right (and split into multiple factions within each). There are a lot of social incentives for people and institutions to lie and, more importantly, for the middlemen to amplify and present those lies. I also think that with so many of our fundamentals on shaky ground, a lot of the lies might not be purposeful. Scientific reporting is a good example: If the science media lauds an experiment that it turns out is non-replicatable, they're not lying on purpose but they're still reporting something that isn't true.
Scientists are incentivized to publish too often/fudge numbers/not do "boring" experiments. The NYT and Fox are incentivized to cut editors and fact checkers and reduce turn around time because people have been conditioned to expect immediate reporting. They're incentivized to cover things with a partisan slant because it goes viral.
Well I just pointed to knowing liars and people who rely on knowing liars. Honestly I think most people are just doing their best to tell their incomplete knowledge accurately, and assessing people in that lens helps clarify a lot. Science media tends to laud an experiment that turns out to be non-replicatable, so it's good to keep that in mind when you read science media. Scientists are incentivized not to do boring experiments, so that's useful to keep in mind when reading science.
But like, how did you know that science media tends to do X? Scientists are incentivized to do Y? How do you know that NYT and Fox are incentivized in the ways you're talking about? The reason why they're even notable is because someone else is looking at it and going "hey!! this is going on!!" and presumably this person isn't a known liar/acting on known lies. Maybe enough independent people are saying it that collusion is statistically unlikely. But you do have a knowledge base. It's as simple as knowing what your knowledge base is, in relative to the knowledge bases others are using.
>I still have low confidence in almost everything I'm told, and doing proper investigations into all of it is excessively time consuming, terrible for my mental health, and frequently impossible/difficult without institutional affiliation for things like being able to read primary academic sources that are being reported on.
>How is the average person supposed to navigate this? There's literally no way.
By embracing the fact that we live in a state of information uncertainty and you can't know everything.
People need to put in hard work to develop their worldview based on analyzing primary source material.
I think what one has been forced to do is find sources/propaganda like RT or Al Jazeera, BBC, Xinhua, Times of India and then distrust things where they have a dog in the fight and then triangulate where they don't have a dog in the fight.
"Just trust the alternative sites" is not gonna cut it either - lands one in the same dumbing swamp, if not worse because the alternative sites have no reputation to lose.
The opioid crisis isn't related to the war on drugs. It was caused by doctors being misinformed about how prescription opioids worked by the drug manufacturers + widely disseminated (funded) research about pain treatment. This caused people to be prescribed opioids without a risk assessment for addiction or similar, and thereby lots of people got addicted after being prescribed for broken bones, surgeries, and general discomforts.
When you hear about X overdoses in an area in a shockingly small amount of time, it's not people dying because they took too many oxycodone pills, it's because of street fentanyl. You can thank the war on drugs for that.
I suspect it was meant as a: "They told me marijuana would ruin my life, but after smoking some, my life is fine, so surely they lied about the other drugs as well"
TL;DR: Marihuana not as bad as stated, surely fentanyl is fine too.
Cannabis is - in my experience - fun, but medically neutral. Doesn't hurt or help me.
Methamphetamine or similar in recreational doses would probably be terrible for both my physical and mental health. I am aware of at least one person in my personal social circles whose entire life has overtly and drastically deteriorated from that addiction.
I have met a few people who find lithium the only effective treatment for their bipolar disorder. When they can actually get their hands on it, their lives improve significantly.
Methylphenidate (Ritalin) - in an extended release formula (Concerta) - is the most valuable tool I have to treat my ADHD. Thinking back on how my life could have been improved if I had it earlier on...is frustrating to say the least.
Major news organizations lie by omission and innuendo. Random people on the internet lie by making stuff up. You shouldn’t trust major news outlets to give you a clear picture of the world, but they can be generally trusted as a source of verifiable fact, even if an incomplete one.
In particular, a major news organisation saying "person X said Y" nearly always will be entirely accurate that person X did indeed say Y. That doesn't in and of itself convey anything about whether Y is true. And you should be quite wary of "unnamed sources".
> That doesn't in and of itself convey anything about whether Y is true.
Especially if X is a celebrity, and not a celebrity for their knowledge about Y. That just says "some random celebrity shot their mouth off about something they likely know next to zero about." That conveys zero bits of useful information.
I saw nothing in the interview to indicate that you should accept 100% of statements mainstream media institutions. Quite the opposite.
You do need to be able to evaluate relative trustworthiness. Mainstream journalism isn't going to be right 100% of the time, but they have a much better track record than rumors spread over social media. In fact, because so many contradictory stories spread on the internet, it's easy to pick ones we want to believe and reject ones that challenge our assumptions. It becomes easy to reject an uncomfortable reality and substitute one that make us feel better about ourselves. So while you should be generally suspicious of "trustworthy media and institutions" you should be very suspicious of your own biases.
A healthy dose of skepticism doesn't mean disbelieving all sources equally.
>I don't really like how this is said as if it is 100% true
I don't see it as being said that way. What was said was, "we should also consider in a positive sense". That is more nuanced than automatic trust, it's more like giving the benefit of the doubt until shown otherwise.
If you are automatically and reflexively suspicious of all public broadcasters and major daily newspapers, then who are you not suspicious of?
When you're in a market sharing space with Infowars and the Buffalo Chronicle, yes the mainstream media and democratically-funded government institutions are generally a hell of a lot more trustworthy.
On "skepticism", people who are inherently distrustful of mainstream institutions tend to be shockingly credulous of fringe people with even less credibility, which is generally far worse.
They're comparatively a lot more trustworthy than anyone decrying the evils of the "MSM", despite serious issues and systematic bias. At the very least, you mostly know who they are.
Certainly, they are more reputable. But I think that a healthy level of skepticism is good and not flat out believing anything from reputable sources is to be expected.
In the US, the New York Times has perhaps the best reputation but they distributed false stories leading up to and during the Iraq war.
I don’t like this idea of “good” sources and “bad” sources and don’t think people should promote trusting sources that are deemed “good.”
Herman and Chomsky write about this in the 80s [0] and I think it’s still valid today. I don’t think we should promote narratives of dualistic struggles, especially if we are presented as being on the righteous side.
I find disturbing how a large portion of the general USA public is apparently convinced that the NYT and CNN are leftist orgs (due to a general political realignment that left not being socially reactionary and imperialism clustered, as far as I understand).
As someone who generally falls further to the left than the right, and sometimes much further, I would agree that those are generally left biased news outlets.
Here's a site that does a pretty decent job of ranking bias per article and per outlet:
If you count averages, I agree, but I would argue that the bulk of what makes the NYT nominally left wing is very safe signaling on almost stereotypically caviar gauche issues, while they're not left wing when it could actually matter or is hard.
Another data point from Pew polling: People who identify the NYT as their main source of news also identify as Democrats 91% of the time and Republicans only 7%.
Any political labeling system, regardless of number of axes, is going to drop details and fail to capture all the ways in which political opinions can vary. That doesn't mean that all labeling systems are equally informative, but it also means that you can indeed model political leaning on a single axis. If you do that, you will absolutely miss details bout the bias of the NYT, but you will also find that the NYT bias tends toward the left.
It is also true that while the NYT generally is biased to the left, some of its articles and editorials can still be biased to the right.
> At the very least, you mostly know who they are.
Which means pretty much nothing. It's not like you live in the same community as the authors of news articles. There's very little you can do individually that can affect them.
It used to be that you were more likely to actually be in the same on-line community as the blogger providing alternative take on events (it's not the same as being in the same physical community, but it's not nothing), but I guess it's rarely the case these days.
I don't have any solutions here. I generally trust neither the mainstream nor alternative sources, which leads me to form weak or no opinions on events in the news - but it's all context-specific. There are bloggers who I trust to be accurate and honest. There are topics on which I feel I can safely take traditional news reporting at face value. There are topics where I accept we'll have to wait a couple years before we get some reliable information.
One of the problems is that the media are not principled. Instead they have agendas and those agendas change over time. This time they are pro-war, the next time they are anti-war, not because of underlying principle (we're against bad guys --however that's defined) but because they advance some second or third order thing they agree or disagree with.
Your quote feels deceptively lacking in context. In particular, the second part ("Unless... truth") is in response to a direct question about a viral hoax that suggested an imminent lockdown. It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies, just as it seems reasonable that a news reporter's publications should remain the source of truth on that reporter's writing and perspectives.
They should have that right. I didn’t say otherwise, nor do I mean otherwise. That doesn’t mean that such speculation is an alternative source of truth for the government’s actual plans.
Which one is the Washington Post, when the US government says X, but the Post says they interviewed two anonymous insider sources and the truth is actually Y? Are they "posing as the government"?
I don't understand the perspective of the other side of this position, at all, frankly. Contradicting official narratives isn't some edge-case scenario we're just making up; it's a core function of the Fifth Estate.
When you read that on a newspaper you know that you're reading a newspaper and they tell you that they've talked with people that allegedly told them something different than the official line.
This doesn't happen with stuff like "no, no the Senate actually didn't pass that law yesterday" that are a matter of obvious public record.
I'm going to put it this way: "reputable" newspapers generally want to influence opionion (lie) in a somewhat subtle way. Publishing trivially disprovable falsehoods about official acts isn't how they act, so you can generally trust the parliament-does-something -> official act -> newspaper writing about the official act custody chain insofar as the official act actually existing.
Agree to disagree that the fluff in the middle of the statement matters. You did just link a snopes "fact-check" that agrees that, "Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth'?", is correctly attributed. The rest of the article is spin, as is often the case with snopes.
The truth is independent of any political or journalistic entity. It's incredibly naive to think that self-appointed arbiters of truth will stop at one issue, the one that you happen to agree with them on.
I don't find it "chilling in all contexts" at all. Organizations very often set up a single channel for information distribution to avoid confusion arising from rumours, personal opinions and speculations. "Whatever gets posted at _____ should be treated as verified info, and everything else you hear as unverified" is very common during events such as natural disasters.
Humans, and the systems they create amongst themselves, like governments, are infinitely more fallible than hardened features of computer systems like database transactions. This is an unbelievably poor analogy.
This entire conversation reaffirms my belief that we need to require more humanities education for STEM majors.
What is being said here is basically the tautological truth that official government acts are indeed the official government acts, generally with some mechanism such as signing, publishing in an official gazette or something like that. Not that government can define reality.
Your Trump example in the other post is the most interesting because Trump actually created confusion on this point, by tweeting random stuff about acts that he then would never follow the proper channels for etc.
While private media in Germany is diverse, German public broadcast has a strong left bias. Besides surveys of people working there, there will be a lot German lefties who claim otherwise. (maybe here too?)
Calling the german media left is like calling the democratic party left.
It is such a propagandistic master piece of rebranding core left values of wealth distribution, which greatly threatens the true powerful ones, as beeing about gender, migration, environment and whatever virtue fashion signal is current.
The right side falls for a simple enemy image and the left is as unimaginative as you can be, whe you have no clue about the underlying problem, certain aspects of capitalism. It works so daunting well.
I didnt call the German media left, as I called the private media diverse in opinion, I call the German public broadcast left which is rather the perception of the German public in majority. It is very sad that you misquote me.
I didn't quote you. I was speaking about the distorted 'left' label.
This distortion is mirrored in this conversation too. It is sad, that you didnt pick up my main point.
Besides, yes you were speaking about Rundfunkanstalten where i was speaking about the media in general. Minor misconception in the broader scheme of the mighty and their useful idiots.
>I call the German public broadcast left which is rather the perception of the German public in majority.
The public perception of any group got capsized by the internet ... speaking of labels.
It's hard to do this when feeds are shoved into every crevice of our digital existence. It took me some time to turn all of those off.
Then it gets pretty quiet, but you're still left to figure out what to do when you're too tired for constructive hobbies. There are cracks in the day that low effort media fills really well.
You don't really have to be busy 24/7 though. Taking 10-15 min here and there to just do nothing and breath is quite nice. Or pickup a book if you really need to get your brain busy. Anything but doomscrolling social media
Once I start, I struggle to stop. I used an ad blocker to remove pagination, and tightly filtered the content I follow. However, I struggle to limit myself to a few minutes when I have something unpleasant to do.
(This comment brought to you by a verifiable human with real biases free of charge by Y Combinator.)
I think it's much simpler to start with a risk-based calculation. That is, you have to evaluate what the "risk" of believing something is, which fundamentally is "what harm will there be if I act as if this is true but it is not" (severity) times "the probability that this thing is not true." (likelihood)
And then when you take the two part proposition that
1) In the attention economy, truth or evenhandedness is not valuable.
There are many people who will gladly and purposely mislead you to gain your attention, influence, votes, dollars, and (in extreme cases) your permission to commit and/or condone violence, crime, hate, etc. against others.
That is, the likelihood that what you are reading is not true (by commission or omission) is very high. At best, it will be partially to mostly true.
2) Most people view content as a form of wish fulfillment, not critical analysis. They're happy to delude themselves and avoid any introspection that what they believe is wrong.
That is, they completely discount the severity of believing something not true. They've already "amortized" that into their decision to read the content they do - they know it agrees with their beliefs (even if they're both wrong.) And even if it is a bit wrong or extreme, see point #1: so is everything else on the Internet.
It's easy to see it has nothing to do with "critical" "ignoring" - most people have already done a very uncritical "ignoring" at a macro level by creating filter bubbles and only see things they want to see, and those spaces are saturated with folks from #1 who convert that wish fulfillment into revenue streams.
No easy answers here, we're tribal apes navigating a low-trust environment.
I should clarify: truth isn't valuable to people producing content. Clickbait, controversy, contrarianism, drama, bullshit are equally valuable, and are much easier to produce than the truth.
Truth is valuable to some people producing content. Take Reuters, for example. They're not trying to be better at producing clickbait than MSNBC or Fox. Instead, they're trying to produce something much closer to the truth. That's all they have to draw people. If they lose their reputation for truth, all they have is left is losing an eyeball-attraction war against others who are better at it.
First, there is no "fact" in there. "Should" by inference points you to an opinion rather than fact.
Fact: Some roses are red.
Opinion: Roses should be red.
Considering that your example of a "fact" starts with an opinion, we don't have much to go off of.
We can get into nuanced comment of fact versus opinion, how facts are mediated through our biases to color our conclusions, or how with many facts we are dealing with statistical models rather than physical laws of the universe, how our biases and collection models can lead us to inaccuracies in what we consider true, or how social truths are only as true as our belief in them, but if we can't even get the difference between fact and opinion, I hold no hope for such nuance.
Unfortunately, the other comment was flagged, but I think this is important because it does highlight the difference between fact, values, social constructions, and opinions.
I agree that men should not win women's beauty contests. That is opinion.
However, trans women are women, not men. This is neither opinion nor fact in the strictest sense, and where nuance gets interesting.
First, you have to understand the difference between sex and gender. Biological sex is not binary, but it's pretty close. Intersex people exist and are often pushed into the binary, though that's changing. Anne Fausto-Sterling asserts that if you add all people who deviate from biological binary sex, you get to about 1.7% of live births. However, there are a lot of ways to compute this number and this would be considered an upper bound. Many of these people are assigned male or female at birth, but it's a factual misunderstanding.
What is interesting here, however, is that even though we could count the number of people who deviate from sex norms, we have trouble identifying who "counts" as intersex. For example, people with Klinefelter syndrome have XXY chromosomes. They are generally counted as male in our system, but we are outside facts now. Do you count a woman as someone with two X chromosomes? If so, this "man" is a "woman."
So even with something as cut and dried as physical sex, we can't get to "facts" because we are working with classifications, and classifications are social constructions and not facts.
Now, we get to the split between biological sex and gender. Gender refers to the role of someone in society. There's no functional reason why we should have two genders in a society, or that they should align with sex. When I say that trans women are women, I am making an argument of social construction, not of "fact."
"Murder is wrong" is a social construction based on a value system, not a fact.
Trans and non-binary genders are speaking to a social construction and role in society rather than a biological sex, but what we do know is that many people do not fit the social constructions of the gender closest to their biological sex.
So, yes, I think a biological male should be able to win a beauty pageant for those in the woman gender. But I want to say that that is opinion based on social construction based on an understanding of the facts of sex and gender. And this is for those who are interested but do not fully understand the difference.
This ignores "overweight" and "ugly", because both of those are social constructions with regard to beauty and is not an interesting conversation to me.
Don't worry, you will increasingly find that there are trusted media and scientific sources who will tell what it's acceptable to think. Otherwise, people will be at risk of reaching different conclusions.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
Speak to any common ideologue, be it religious, political, or some flavor oriented upon the latest health hullabaloo. Their arguments are invariably authoritarian.
Empiricism, science... they aren't really a tool in your average person's epistemological toolbox. The 99% is as boneheadedly authoritarian today as it was 1000 years ago
What a BS term. As far as I understood, there's nothing critical nor ignoring about it. But we have to come up with cool-sounding buzzwords for marketing's sake. What they call critical ignoring is about being intentional with the way you live your life and not drifting into whatever way your environment pulls you.
It’s not about sources. Yes that is important but having our anger pointed in a different direction every day/week seems extremely problematic. It’s about learning to ignore those sensation stories that are going to disappear in a week or two and focusing on what YOU care about.
It’s made worse by outspoken online groups liking to claim moral superiority by caring about “everything” and then forcing it other with things like “anti-racism”. It’s no longer enough to be concise of your bias and work on that… no you now need to actively be doing anti-racist things which is entirely dependent on some tiny group of people.
The goalposts just keep moving and you just need to ignore this toxic online discourse. At the end of the day it really is just to made to divide.
I was looking forward to some well thought out strategy to manage the volume of information that I receive.
Alas, this article provided nothing to me but alarm bells, even based on the article's own method of validation. For example, the Dr. Kozyreva wrote several articles on "critical ignoring", yet none of them are referenced. No claims are actually referenced.
The "lateral reading" immediately set alarms off in my mind, and I think the recommendation is diametrically opposed to how I believe we should read news.
It recommends to do "what fact checkers" do.
> Normally we read a website from top to bottom. That's how we learn it in school: to critically examine a text by going through it very carefully from beginning to end. Fact checkers proceed differently: they open another tab in the browser - i.e. sideways - and do internet searches on who’s behind the website. There are an astonishing number of sites that make themselves appear legitimate, but are in fact backed by lobby groups, for example from industry, who try to influence public opinion in this way.
In short I interpret this as - abandon the albeit slow, but well thought out scientific method. Trust other sources to make the judgement for you. The author & affiliation are the primary driver of the decision, irrelevant of the validity of the claim itself.
Horrifying. According to this, "fact checkers" do not check facts, only who makes the claim, irrelevant of the claim's veracity.
Here's the journal article that the OP is based on. It's not concrete, but it does identify several kinds of distracting information. After reading the article I did begin deliberately ignoring much of my social media and low-quality news sites:
1. Leave phone somewhere not in my pocket and not within reach 2. Always have a book handy in my free time.
At least in my case, reaching for and reading my phone happens pre-cognition. It's completely automatic. I've found that I enjoy reading just as much, but unless I plan for it I don't have a book in reach. So the solution has been pretty simple: keep a book in reach!
Highly recommend.