Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

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Not all information is equal.

If you read a wide spectrum of news sources with high standards (established non-tabloid newspapers and reputable long form publishers), I would be willing to bet that you are far better off (pick any metric) than someone spending the same amount of time with OAN/Fox/Daily Mail, etc.

This goes for someone anywhere on the political spectrum; I'm not just picking on the right. I would much rather live in a society of people that I don't necessarily agree with but that get their information from sources that value truth, than live with people of the same ideological bent, but only get their news from propaganda.

I can have a conversation with someone who thinks we're on the wrong side of the peak on the Laffer curve and wants to lower government spending. I can't have a conversation with someone that heard that immigrant run daycares are feeding pets to children and that we should cut daycare programs from the government budget.

Mainstream news is as bad as the social media rumor mill, just in different ways. The MSM has problems with groupthink and huge blind spots which can lead people astray, but it’s wrapped in a presentable package, so average people are more likely to trust it blindly. Alt media tends to either be BS propaganda, or highly competent in one very specific domain (occasionally venturing out of that area, to its own detriment), but it’s very difficult to discern which it is based on appearances or even quality of writing.

The only solution for a thinking person is to read widely and synthesize all your knowledge into a slightly more accurate picture of the whole.

Social media and fringe alt media can be bad for people with cognitive issues, but that’s not a reason to get rid of them.

(Note, there are many times when both the MSM and most of the alt media present a distorted picture! I would argue the ongoing Iran crisis is one of those times.)

> This goes for someone anywhere on the political spectrum; I'm not just picking on the right.

I respectfully object to this. I’m thinking of research that was done a few years ago, measuring American’s knowledge of current events. The folks in the research that leaned right were generally more informed - meaning, they knew about a lot more currents events. But they were also overwhelmingly wrong about what they ‘knew’. Further, folks on the right tended to rate themselves higher than left-leaning folks wrt their knowledge, even though they were wrong a lot more.

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