It's ironic to even call those experiences discussions when no new ideas are exchanged. It's just people of the same worldview taking turns chanting verses of their creed. Nothing learned nor imparted.

What sources would you recommend instead?

All of them. Even the ones of your enemies. Sometimes you need to know the other side’s angle to understand if you’re unknowingly biased.

Totally. Here's the thing: 95% of the time I see someone argue what you're arguing online, it's from someone who only believes completely false news sources (rather than biased).

If you mean the Breitbart subscribers who also get the “other side” from Fox, then yes I agree with that characterization.

I like to read international sources like DW, RT, Al Jazeera, and of course BBC. How do other countries want me to interpret current events?

How do you know they are false? And completely false, at that? Just asking.

It's insane to me that anyone on this site is even asking this. What's next: Should I be led to believe those little ads at the bottom aren't scams? The ones that say something like, "SHOCKING! Dentists in <your area> don't want you to know this trick that could save you thousands." Maybe the guy trying to sell me speakers from his van really is a trustworthy guy. I just got a call from someone saying my laptop is infected with malware and needs $400 wired to India to fix. I can't prove definitively he's lying, so I guess I should consider him a valuable resource.

Just go look at Infowars or Zerohedge for 5 minutes. I'm not sure what to tell you, if you come out of that thinking that they're not trying to take advantage of suckers.

It was a rhetorical question, but since you tried to earnestly answer it I’ll bite.

If you read Matt Levine’s Bloomberg column (I highly recommend it) then you’ll eventually encounter a point he repeatedly makes about institutional investing: the best opportunities are always right at the edge of comfortable. Hidden gems tend to hang out in the same neighborhoods as outright frauds, metaphorically speaking.

I check ZeroHedge daily, not because I “trust” it as a news source, but in accordance with the principle I alluded to above: the really good stuff is probably going to be hidden among outright conspiracy theories and psyops. Most of the crap on ZH is just crossposts from various blogs anyway so it’s pretty easy to filter through it.

Here’s the thing, no, they don’t.

You recently said this to me:

”Part-time Portlander here! You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Please stop basing your worldview on Infowars talking points.”

I’ve obviously never seen anything produced by infowars and this was a dismissive epithet, doing exactly the problem described here. You’re one of them. And my point you were responding to was objectively true.

https://ground.news/ is an interesting idea.

About 30% of the stories on zerohedge, as long as you're awake enough to filter out the remaining noise.