Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens
mpg.de
mpg.de
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.
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.
"We will continue to be your single source of truth...Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth."
Xi Jingping must be proud that his thought is becoming so widespread.
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.
This entire conversation reaffirms my belief that we need to require more humanities education for STEM majors.
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.
Why shouldn't citizens have the right to speculate that their government is lying to them about its intended plans?
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.
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.
When thinking critically, be mindful of sub-perceptual heuristics.
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.
Here's a site that does a pretty decent job of ranking bias per article and per outlet:
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.
But left/right is a single axis. If you’re measuring left/right bias then you’re going to have a single axis.
A different argument is only the quality or usefulness of a media outlet. That’s definitely more dimensions and one would be left/right bias.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...
I don’t think this is unique to the US either. People believe crazy things (or perhaps just like trolling pollsters).
I’m not even sure what a “leftist org” means.
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.
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?
Nobody! I worked for a guy who etched below his monitor "TRUST NOONE", he was a difficult guy to be around.
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.
TL;DR: Marihuana not as bad as stated, surely fentanyl is fine too.
"Here, take some lithium and/or ritalin, or your life will be ruined!"
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.
It turns out that lazy dichotomies are worthless.
But yes, there was heavy pressure to conform to a narrative. People were sacked or threatened in the name of "balance" against the "too liberal" anti-war argument. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
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'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.
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.
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.
The incentives are perverse at this point.
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.
>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.
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.
(exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari managed to get sacked for entirely fabricating quotes)
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.
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.
Shortly I dont trust German public broadcast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So one path to "critical ignoring" would be to fill your life with beneficial busy-ness.
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.
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.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121...