That’s a false dilemma; as long as I’m not resigned to hopeless infotainment addiction, I don’t have to believe the “least bad” reporting about events that don’t concern me.

I am absolutely 100% confident that the success rate of individuals with no training doing their own research is way way way lower than the success rate of the academic community consensus.

That’s not what I’m arguing against. I’m not claiming to be a better truth-seeker than the academic community.

I am claiming that a lot of this truth has no meaning to me, and I’m comfortable with not seeking it. If that sounds horrible, consider a special case like celebrity gossip. Am I better than the magazines at getting to the bottom of it? Probably not. Does that fact implore me to seek their “knowledge”?

I distrust many media accounts of events. I don’t believe their opposites either. And I don’t “do my own research”. I just embrace ignorance of things that don’t matter to me.

In the aggregate, or in all cases?

It may not matter what you believe, but it matters what the aggregate total of your fellow voters believe.

Is your point that most voters are hopeless infotainment addicts?

>The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to get my information from Facebook articles posted by Russian intelligence!

There's the middle ground of simply not believing anything coming from either the mass media or the independent media.

That does require recusing yourself from politics, though. Not unreasonable but if everyone does it the field is abandoned to cranks and exploiters.

I assume you mean acknowledging the different credibility of different sources, instead of just not believing anything at all. It's just as with the academia thing. I don't think the solution is to dismiss formal research and consider it unscientific, but to acknowledge it's weaknesses, specially in specific fields.

To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything.

This problem has existed since forever, and back in the day I believed something like reddit would work because real humans would do the curation for me and call out bad news/research/etc, but we all know how that turned out.

>To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything.

So you don't even believe Donald Trump is the President of the United States, because you refuse to believe the media when it covered the campaign and election?

I'm going to guess you either don't actually hold this point of view, otherwise you could barely function in society.

I think you're taking it too literally. What I mean is that, as an example, if they say $POLITICAL_FIGURE has said this or that, I will suspect they're taking the words out of context, but I am not going to find and watch the entire video, because I don't have the necessary time and energy to do that.

I think this is what is called hyperbole.

> "The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to get my information from Facebook articles posted by Russian intelligence!"

Have you genuinely experienced people expressing exactly this sentiment, or are you perhaps relying on a complex heuristic within your mind?

Do you believe it's possible some people think more along the lines of "The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to be more skeptical next time there seems to be coordinated promotion of an idea that seems to rely upon fear."

Speaking of Russians on Facebook and Twitter, I've yet to see any convincing evidence that this is a real thing. I don't deny someone is engaging in such behavior, but nothing I've seen gives me confidence that it is safe to conclude it is Russia.

> "There was once a batch of contaminated vaccines, so now I'm going to risk the lives of my and other children by not vaccinating them"

Same thing, but I won't beleaguer the point.