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.
"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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
(exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari managed to get sacked for entirely fabricating quotes)
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 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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
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.
When thinking critically, be mindful of sub-perceptual heuristics.
"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.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Dead Comment