* Diversify your information inputs both in terms of leaning, but also format and platform. I read the Economist, New York Times, and WSJ. I also watch YouTubers (Philip de Franco is one of my staples), read Hacker News and Reddit. I also listen to podcasts.
* Try and find the primary sources when possible. Preferably, view the primary sources before reading the news coverage. This will help you judge the primary source without being primed to think one way or another.
* Look at the sources and references provided by the media you're reading. Good ones will link to primary sources as much as possible. Poor ones will often not link to primary sources - often this is because they are misrepresenting the source and if they linked to them then readers would see this deception.
The reason the us was so vulnerable to fake news is that we’ve spent the last several generations educating our children to be compliant consumers that don’t question authority or use critical thinking skills.
The funny thing about this thread is I bet that half of the people think of very different things that the other half when they think of fake news.
Following your biases will never do this.
Really you only need three things, so it is "easy" but not easy, if you take my meaning. 1) you have to genuinely value and prioritize reducing your biases, knowing this may make for some difficult times for you. 2) you must develop a capability for critical thought (essentially, education though it need not be formal). 3) and most importantly you must do the work. And it is work.
Number (2) alone won't do you any good, which is why you see highly educated people who are very biased.
The simple model works when you're dealing with proving that your cat is on fire, it's much harder when the topic gets complicated.
Then as a society we apply the wisdom of the crowd.
And we've come full circle back to bias.
I was not disputing we all have an internal bias built up by our experiences. The crux of that point is you try to minimise your own bias and try to further reduce that bias by including the bias of the remainder of society.
I don't think this is a terrible way to select a political candidate.
As an aside I don't understand how a political discussion could exist without bias. What is your model of politics that would allow it to exist without bias?
Not arbitrary, I'm not arguing that. I am arguing that education and intelligence isn't enough to combat biases. A lot of people commenting here are touting education and intelligence as some sort of bias reducing (or eliminating) tool, which it can be, but as I've said elsewhere I know plenty of educated intelligent people who are slaves to their biases. Some of these people gained their biases through education, and they discount their biases because they believe they are too intelligent to have biases.
What I think many people are missing here is that biases aren't something you educate away, they're something education helps you recognize and compensate for.
Also I note your use of the phrase"perfect judgments" here. Perfect how? For whom? Under what criteria? There's no such thing as a "perfect judgment" without framing it in a context (i.e. using a bias). One person's perfect, logically sound, rational judgment might not be so for another person.
Amusing example: my son refused, for a couple years, to learn single-digit addition facts. He already understood that there was no limit to the number of integers, but since he didn't know that single-digit addition facts could be composed to add arbitrarily large numbers, he silently reasoned that the infinitude of integers doomed any attempt to learn addition. Everyone talking about specific addition problems was a chump! He just went on for a couple grades thinking everyone was stupidly wasting their time before we had a conversation that unearthed his reasoning.
And that wasn't even starting with an incorrect belief- just some missing information. Imagine the sorts of explosions you could get yourself into starting with one of those and reasoning as far as you can with it!
- take the facts the all sources with competing perspectives agree on as likely to be the truth
- for facts that appear highly relevant but only appear articles with one perspective, but omitted in articles with an opposing perspective, seek out primary evidence to corroborate the evidence. Every time they turn out to be true, give trust points to the ones that included it and subtract trust points from the ones that omitted it. If they turn out to be false or distorted, do the opposite.
- discard everything that is obviously opinion, conjecture, etc.
- then rinse and repeat, building an internal model of trustworthiness for different sources and update those models as the trustworthiness of those different sources change over time.
Are there not news verification products out there that I can use instead? I'm not a journalist. I don't have the education to find very specific claims sources that aren't other news articles. eg. Where am I supposed to go hunting for an exact quote stated by a politician on video except from another news cast recording the event?
How would a "news verification" service work? It would just be journalists verifying the work of other journalists. There are fact checking platforms, but, again, it's journalists all the way down, at least until you hit primary sources like scientific papers, at which point you have a slightly different verification problem.
At a certain point, you have to accept that your information about current events is going to come from journalists, which is why it's necessary to cross-check it and understand how you might be mislead.
If you've got any recommendations for good outlets, I'd appreciate it. Always looking for more.
In all seriousness, mises.org is good for current commentary, if not breaking news.
Look at every thread ever about CockroachDB.
In case it helps, only about 10% of HN users are in the Bay Area. A bit less actually.
If you read some left-leaning publications you'll be told that warming is caused by humans releasing greenhouse gasses at a massive scale. If you read some right-leaning publications they'll tell you that it's all caused by the sun.
If you read some right-leaning publications you'll be told that the problematic expansion in consumer debt has been caused by low interest rates, explicit government subsidies for borrowing, and tax, social assistance and liability disincentives for working people to earn additional income or save rather than spending. If you read some left-leaning publications they'll tell you that it's all caused by racism and sexism.
In each case one side is telling stories for political advantage and you don't get the truth by averaging the propaganda with the facts. But if you stop listening to one side because it was wrong on one issue, you stop listening to that side when it's right on a different one.
This is an argument to moderation, though. Hypothetically, "both sides" may not have been doing any research at all, but making up their positions from whole cloth in order to encourage effects that benefit them personally. You might end up either always thinking that the truth was somewhere in between, or that one was right half of the time, and the other was right the other half, when actually the relationship between your sources and the truth was entirely arbitrary.
Especially 1) because you can commonly both be telling the truth and telling a story for political advantage, and 2) because "both sides" might actually only be one entity, with the intention of defining the range of acceptable opinion.
In practice there is a strong probability that if true facts advance the position of one side, that side will present those facts -- and, of course, that the other side won't.
What this means is that you need two things. The first is to listen to a variety of sources, and the second is to evaluate things they say for yourself to try to ascertain who is telling the truth about what.
And sometimes they're both telling the truth. There are a lot of situations where the government can take $100 from Peter and use it in a way that creates a $105 benefit for Paul. Then Paul argues that they should do it because it's creating a $5 surplus and Peter argues that they shouldn't because it's clearly inequitable. Both of which are true and accurate assessments of the situation, but you still have to make a decision. Better that it be an informed one, one way or another.
> because "both sides" might actually only be one entity, with the intention of defining the range of acceptable opinion.
Sure, absolutely. The whole concept of "sides" is an artificial frame created by the two party system and there are plenty of external actors (corporations, foreign governments) who are quite adept at playing one side against the other for their own benefit.
The answer is to go beyond "both sides" and find the outlets (often foreign or subversive) that provide sides three, four, five and six. Then apply the same tools to evaluate their narratives that you use for anything. A lot of what they're saying will be bunkum, but so is a lot of what CNN or Fox says.
You could even go so far as to listen to the likes of Alex Jones once in a while -- for entertainment value if nothing else, like watching Alias or X-Files. Give yourself critical thinking practice to evaluate the flaws in some reporting that you have strong reason to suspect is in fact flawed. But watch out -- it turns out even he gets some things right:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascade...
Being able to debunk lies is a much more important skill than being able to find publishers who never lie about or omit anything, the latter of which is surely impossible.
Actually, edit: How is this different from 'mob' news?
There is always bias, and I have spoken to that.
But where you have specifics, sign up for the newsletter.
Set some email filters and go.
I would flip the question. Why would I want to keep track of current affairs? The vast majority of the things happening in the world have no impact on my life whatsoever. Even really big things like the Mueller report really don't have any impact on my day-to-day life (NB: I am a US citizen).
I do research on individual ballot propositions when it comes time to vote. I virtually always vote for third party candidates or no-one at all, but if a political party I actually support ever gains enough prominence to have a chance of winning I'll do my due diligence on their individual candidates too. Aside from that, who cares?
1) If I am a person that is capable of getting pregnant and wishes to have the option to terminate my pregnancy, it would be prudent to keep up to date on the legislation involving that.
2) If I am a trans person or a person of LGBTQ status, it would be prudent to keep up to date on legislation involving my healthcare needs and whether or not I am a protected class in my state and whether or not killing me because of my demographic is considered acceptable in certain circumstances ('gay panic' defense).
3) If I am a police officer or related to police offers, it would be prudent to keep up to date on legislation involving my employment or the employment applied to others. This applies also to civil servants in general, I would suspect, such as preparing for an upcoming gov't shutdown.
4) If I care about guns and my participation in guns or hunting, it would be prudent to keep up to date on legislation regarding my allowance, status, and licensing needs in accordance. This also applies if I happen to inherit a weapon from a grandparent or similar.
5) If I care about the tax structure of my country, it would be prudent to keep up to date on legislation regarding tax decisions, especially to keep track of which legislative big spending budget cuts or allowances are being made that will affect my taxes, for example the big tax return changes in america of 2019.
6) If I am related to, depended on by, or use Schedule I or otherwise restricted drugs legally or illegally for my medical need(pain, seizures, anxiety, chronic illness, cancer, etc), it would be prduent to keep up to date on legislation to understand how futures decisions will affect my access to my medical care of choice.
7) If I use or am related to someone who uses veterans benefits, SNAP, disability benefits, social security, medicare/medicaid, etc. it would be prudent to keep up to date to understand legislation on how future decisions would affect my/people I know's quality of life.
8) If I am an immigrant or am applying for legal immigrant status of any kind, it would be important for me to keep up to date with current legislation or direction of parties regarding my status as an immigrant and my children.
9) If I care about any of the above, say, I have relatives or friends that are affected by any of the above and wish to support them by voting, donating, or otherwise advocating in alliance with them, it would be important for me to keep up to date with any of the above in order to participate demographically in a system.
I care about guns, but not enough to actively try to influence gun legislation. Historically, as long as my purchases are legal at the time of purchase, I'm almost certainly fine.
I care about taxes insofar as I pay them, but outside of when I'm actually doing my taxes I don't really care. I do check current rates periodically when updating my budget, but that's not a "current events" thing, it's a "make sure my budget is accurate" thing.
I am related to someone who uses SNAP. I assume that if their benefits change meaningfully they'll hear about it from the government agency managing those benefits and I'll hear about it from them.
Unless I'm going to go out and try to influence legislation about any of the above before it's passed (which I'm not), I utterly do not care about them until they affect me, and I'm likely to find out when they do without following the news. As I said above, I do vote and I do research the things I vote on, but I do that right before I vote. I would never remember the odd related news story I read 6 months prior the relates to a particular ballot proposition anyway.
(The rest of the points you mentioned don't apply to me at all so I don't have any opinion on whether I would feel differently about keeping up with current events if they did.)
This does not allow you to investigate if the people you vote for follow through with anything you cared to vote for them for.
Many of us experienced that as friends came out in more difficult times.
We learned what affects them, does also affect us.
Impacted friends are not as much fun as happy, healthy ones are.
Then consider yourself privileged. For the rest of us, there are forces out there trying to legislate our bodies, prevent us from loving who we want, oppress who we want to be, take away our rights, and make our mere existence as close to illegal as possible. Keeping track of who is trying to take away our liberties and how those efforts are progressing is very important to us.
The reality is we the people do have very considerable control. An additional reality is we the people are currently very distracted and being messaged to on a near constant basis.
Our effective control is at a low ebb right now. That's due to what I just wrote, plus money in politics, and that same money working consolidated media. (Reagan Fairness Doctrine Repeal; Clinton Telecoms Act of 1996)
You aren't wrong, but neither is the parent commenter!
The civil rights movement is the most immune to these effects as social issues tend to be least impacted by money particularly as big business realizes it's best for business when people get along. And it helps that there are people in executive positions right now who are directly impacted by shit social policy.
Progressives, and for purposes of discussion here, are people who are socially liberal and economically left, are building people powered politics as you read this. That's knocking on doors, holding events, messaging directly, largely avoiding big media, and that's largely due to the fact that big media sees the economic left focus as a potential cost and risk.
(as they should, but that does not mean some change is not warranted --many feel it is, but I digress here)
Manufacturing Consent --Chomskey is a great reference to understand the basic dynamics in play. You probably have read it too. It's here for passers by as much as anything else.
Democracy is largely functional, but it's noisy, and the noise is getting in the way of what would otherwise be a respectable state of affairs.
All of us know a gay person. All of us know a woman. All of us know a child.
These things do matter. While some of us, and this includes me, are in the pocket so to speak, can choose to largely ignore all this stuff, we do so at our friends, peers, future leaders, loved ones potential and personal cost and risk.
That's the argument anyway.
Those of us who are paying attention just need to continue talking with others.
It will build. As it should.
Here's a particularly good post about it: https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-whe...
I too have trouble getting out of my shell / headphones but online civic engagement is at best an interesting if oddly-tasting topping to the real thing.
I have a set of these running with people all over the world.
Forums, discord, Reddit, other places. The phone! Something happens, and I know who is gonna call. They want to talk all about it. What do we know, what can we infer, what might it mean?
Those are the best!
We all look at what was published, then discuss.
Some groups are focused too, sometimes doing research, timelines...
The value in those circles is huge, some cultivated over years. I know where I can go for a question, others know they can come to me. Each of us has domain knowledge, or experience, or cares enough to be valuable.
You could just use TYT, and contrast that with a few major newspapers and networks.
Talking with a diverse set of others, who will do that to seek being better informed really does help. Not everyone can though.
As for "not bringing politics into it", sadly everything is political.
Pure tech and science has the very least, but it is still there.
Even getting the info is political as you have seen.
No easy outs on this, also sadly.
I feel your frustration. I dealt with it two decades ago in this way. I have much less of it now.
The hard truth of it is most of the time when people are looking for who to just trust, that trust gets abused.
Eventually, they resign to avoiding the lot of it, and doing that is OK do not get me wrong here, or they seek peers for that need in their life.
Politically savvy people tend to trend social, but they also can understand people who are not.
Make a few friends. You know stuff. They may not. Trade for mutual enlightenment. No joke.
That is how I got started. Tech issues, copyright, etc... I could fill in blanks, and did. They could take current events and boil that down into a useful discussion.
I love most of those people and would miss those conversations terribly.
Edit: One other thing: I definitely do not agree with the politics all my conversation partners hold, nor they mine. That is OK. We are all good minded humans looking to make sense of things, maybe act when we need to, or understand we really do have common cause.
Being wrong or different is not a big deal. Unless it is. In most of my circles, it isn't. Group knowledge has info in it that individual knowledge does not.
Can't get it unless we actually talk about stuff.
That is all I got man. If it does not help, no worries.
Watch the documentary “Being in the world” for more.