I no longer use social media as my primary source for information. Ever since I stopped using Twitter, I have been reading so much more, and putting more of an effort to seek out divergent perspectives on things, and I feel like my intellectual hygiene has dramatically improved. I spend a lot more time thinking and forming opinions, rather than reacting to headlines. Highly recommend.
Discussion
So hat are your main sources of information now? Do you seek out opposing viewpoints to what you're reading or read multiple sources on a topic that leads to all perspectives being covered?
I don't really have any main sources of information. There are some news outlets that I generally respect more than others. But I've gotten a lot better, when I'm interested in a particular news event, at reading coverage on that event from 3-4 different news outlets, of different political slants, and from different parts of the world.
How are you being influenced in terms of what events are important?
A big challenge with news outlets is the curation of topics. Social media obviously isn't immune to this though, it's just more organic with more potential for otherwise suppressed topics and views to surface.
I went through a phase of subscribing to and reading The Spectator cover to cover each week (skipping all the Conservative Party political stuff). Better than most, but still relied on Twitter (at the time) to help me find topics to look into.
I think this is an intellectual rabbit hole from which there is no tractable escape. When people pose this as a problem, they are usually starting from the in-built assumption that they have libertarian free will (in the philosophical sense, not political sense) and that ethically, ensuring that actuality of ones own choices over what to pay attention to, are not intruded on.
The problem is, is no matter what, the information coming to you is being curated. Even your senses are curating information to you, based on what your biology thinks is important for you to pay attention to, based on things that have been selective for survival. But thatās getting a little too abstract.
As it pertains to knowledge of by the outside world, and in the domain of human affairs, there is no such thing as objective facts. There just isnāt. You are 100% reliant on the testimony of others to obtain information about human affairs beyond your immediate cone of experience. Whether itās a journalist working for a left-leaning rag, or some anonymous person her on Nostr recounting some information about whatās going on in some random corner of the world, the information coming to you is being curated. Said anonymous person is deciding to share specific information based on their preferences.
A lot of people in these parts have come to believe that anonymous person is as good, if not better, source of truth and un-curated information, than a news organization, given the letterās interests and agenda. There is this bias, stemming from this demand to protect the idea of the libertarian free experience, that makes one come to the conclusion that a more anarchic process for obtaining information about the world is a better way to uncover truth. This is actually completely wrong, and I think, provably so.
Everyone is being manipulated by the people they consume information from. Iām manipulating you right now. Thatās the nature of human communication and dialogue. A parent is manipulating their children, and trying to communicate values to them, based on their curation of what they think is important. A leader in an organization is doing the same thing to the people they lead. The people who post on social media are doing the same.
The belief that the truth of the world is easier to see once you completely reject professional journalism is really a false hope. Youāve just chosen different curators.
Professional journalism doesnāt imply being full of lies and falsehoods to justify false cored claims about the facts.
*actualization of ones choices
I don't disagree with any of that. Just curious about what you do personally?
Btw, I'd advocate for a mixture - clearly both sources of curation have problems. Maybe the combination cancels out some of them.
To your original point: agree that reading more also helps to cultivate a sense of what is interesting and what matters. History, novels, real long form journalism etc.
I donāt really have a method. I tend to intentionally seek out sources of information that challenge what I think, though. I probably spend more time reading the arguments *against* what I believe, and the arguments I make, than reading the arguments of people who agree with me.
How that approach turns into internet searches, I donāt really know. I havenāt tried to systematize my approach to information discovery in any way that would be terribly exciting to talk about. It would probably be best described as disorganized and scatterbrained, and some internal socratic dialogues from time to time, trying to convince myself Iām wrong about what I think, through imagining counterfactuals, and trying to identify what would have to be true for me to be wrong, or some haphazard positivist construction like that. That being said, Iām not a strict positivist.
I like that. By looking at arguments against you get introduced to a lot of topics and issues you may never have considered. Strongly endorse this!
Difficult to systematize indeed. Investing in your own knowledge base, looking at more sources of curation, and articulating your own thought-through opinion seem directionally good in general (vs. Just reading one paper and parroting their views).
Cheers, thanks for explaining further š
With important stuff I always look for more "sauces". Preferably with different biases. And still you can't be sure, even being eye whitness doesn't mean you saw every angle.
The problem I see with big general media is they pretty often write absolute nonsense and you only see it when it happens to be in the field you know very well. And then you wonder what about the rest of their output? Can't trust them? And then the same newspaper "prints" something in the same field that's actually correct and well informed.
Not easy, it never was.
There are 2 issues: curation and trust. Was curious about Mike's curation approach, but agree that the trust/accuracy issue is also critical.
I thought this essay by Scott Alexander was a good perspective on that: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
Kudos. Do you use any news aggregator sites? I find these to be mixed reliability but 1440 daily digest has been a good topical starting point for me.
been having the same transformation lately, highly recommend
just reading more already improves a lot your lifestyle
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Nice, what are u reading lately? And why did u choose those to read?