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The News: A User's Manual

#1
Secular Sanity Offline
Apparently, in order to appear highly intelligent, you must keep up to date on the latest news topics. I did not know that. It’s too time consuming, and it’s starting to read a lot like high school gossip, but nevertheless, I was made to feel like a total idiot for not knowing the latest and greatest.

How do you navigate your way through the news?

The News: A User's Manual

What do you think about what he’s saying when he touches on this really awkward topic? What are your thoughts?

Quote:It’s very easy to think that people are quite nice until you read a news article, and you go as the say in the trade, “Below the Line,” and you find about the comments—what people are saying on social media, too, and then you’re in for a shock because you realize then that people aren’t nice. They’re crazy, vindictive, bitter, angry, furious, and just insane.

***So, what’s going on? Are we crazy as a species? No-no, we’re not crazy. We’re just writing our journals in public. You know how it is when you keep a journal and you’ve had a bad day. You go off to your bedroom, you take out your journal, and you say, “I’ve had enough. I’m killing myself. I hate everybody. I hate myself. I’m a loser and then the tears start mixing with the ink. It’s all very poignant and emotional but then you put the journal away then you rejoin group life, and it’s very-very important that no one knows what you wrote in the journal because if they do, they can’t look at you in the same way again. It’s just really bad information to know about you. So, you’ve got to keep that private. Now I believe that the same holds true in a way with these comments. These are just journal entries, and because we have to get out there, trust people, love, and do business with people, it’s really important that we don’t know certain things about our fellow human beings because if we do, it will make a lot of things very hard. I don’t know if you guys are working on this but I have serious doubts about the social validity of some of these comments. We’re not quite understanding what they do to our minds. We’re living in communities and this is giving us information about communities that we might not want to hear. So, it’s something to bear in mind.

***Aristotle was very aware that his fellow Athenians did a weird thing every year. They went out and looked at tragedies. Aristotle made a very fascinating point.  He said, look, it is horrific. It is ghastly, but properly appreciating the dynamics within tragedy is part of the civilizing process. An education in horror has a role to play in civilizing you. A very weird point. Now, why is Aristotle saying this? Because he felt that in the hands of a great tragedian, a story can be told in such a way that rather than calling the guy who has murdered his family a weirdo or nutcase, etc. You start to see something very-very frightening indeed, which is that all of us our capable of anything when pushed in a certain way. I know it sounds unreasonable but that's what he believed and I think he was right. We are all on the edge of precipice all the time, and if we don’t do these things, it’s because we have not been pushed hard enough, or we’ve been blessed with a certain capacity for restraint, but it is there. The fear should be there. We should feel pity for the tragic hero, who has ruined his or her life, and we should feel fear for ourselves—how close we come to the precipice.

***In looking at these things we are searching for the meaning of life. Back in the middle ages, it used to be a classic piece of interior decoration to put a skull on your table. Why, because the reminder of death is a very important part on leading you to focus on what is important in life. In order to try and separate out the things that are meaningful and the things that are less rich in meaning, and in a way these tragic news stories are our modern mementos. These are modern skulls on a table but we don’t really use them as such. So, again we’re not quite using the information, which is on the edge of something very interesting in the way that it should be used.

***The news is meant to terrify us and that’s why when our car breaks down, and we have to go and seek the help of a stranger, we know that we’re going to be chopped up into small pieces because we have read the news.  We know everyone out there is a serial killer. Then we come across a stunning realization that people are really nice.  We’ve got a really crooked sense of statistics. By its very nature, the news over represents the weird, dark stuff, but because it’s on all the time, we tend to think nowadays that the weird dark stuff is us. It precisely isn’t us, and that’s why it’s in the news, but we miss that very basic point. This matters because the news starts to influence what we think it means to live among Americans. What are Americans like? Well, they’re on the whole crazy and they shoot people in huge numbers.

***There is very little information nowadays that is gathered through our own senses and our own experiences. We have off loaded the task of making up our minds in large measure to the people in the news industry.

***I think it’s even worse than a collusion. This is kind of a Chomsky line. The Chomsky line says there are elderly white males sitting somewhere controlling the media, pulling the strings, trying to get us to think in certain ways. I think that it’s even worse than that because if there really were these guys, we could go out there and get them. The problem is, is that it is largely unconscious. It’s unconscious bias of the worse sort. In any area that you look at, there are the questions that you’re allowed to ask, and the questions that sound a bit weird. There’s censorship and I think we need to keep asking those really uncomfortable questions and be aware of it. We have surrendered a very big part of our brains to organizations and it used to be the case that you knew. A friend of mine that used to live under communism would say, "Under communism the great thing was that we knew it was all wrong in the media so we thought quite hard." The problem nowadays is that people think it’s right.  We’ve stopped thinking and that’s the problem.
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#2
Syne Offline
Just off the top of my head...

1. Find a few trusted sources. Ones that you have verified by watching their coverage of many, especially controversial, events from start to finish. Make sure they are not prone to running with unverified rumors, anonymous sources, conspiracy theories, etc., don't bury the lead or clickbait or stealth edit, and actually follow up when the facts become known, regardless of how it may fit their narrative.

2. Don't trust headlines. Many, especially untrustworthy, sources write clickbaity headlines that imply the polar opposite of what the article actually says. This is often employed with burying the lead so that even those who might read a little of the article may still miss the relevant facts. If you're going to pay any attention to the news, read entire articles and never believe anything based solely on a headline.

3. Use many sources with a large variety of ideological biases. The facts they all agree on tend to be the only actual facts known. Everything else tends to be opinion masked as objective news. Using many sources allows you to verify info in one against others.

4. Learn the difference between opinion/editorializing and actual journalism. This line is very often blurred by unscrupulous newsies. Many good sources are clear about their bias, making the opinions in their pieces fairly easy to suss out, but others intentionally portray their opinion as objective journalism. They can also editorialize by not covering certain stories that don't fit their narrative and allowing guests to spin false narratives without being challenged.

5. Be critical. As with anything in life, a healthy dose of skepticism can save you from believing a lot of snake oil claims. Try to reserve judgement for when more facts, that many diverse sources agree on, become known. But the inverse can also be informative, where the dearth facts continue so long that it's not likely that there is any there there.



Knowledge of the news is often how mediocre people make themselves feel intelligent, like the Daily Show audience. They might mock you for not keeping up, but that's only because it's their only barometer of intelligence...which any truly intelligent person knows is no measurement of smarts at all. Once you've found a few trusted sources, it's not all that time consuming. You can basically stop reading and completely dismiss any story that includes the words "anonymous source", usually dismiss that most alarming headlines, and if you can weed out the crazy, even use the comments as a shortcut evaluation.
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