- About “critical ignoring”, vetting sources of news before you read them;
- The distractions of the internet;
- Today’s back-of-the-envelope timeline, from Savannah/tribal morality to Enlightenment values and now back to Savannah/tribal morality.
Here’s a piece, which I probably stumbled upon via Facebook, with a provocative premise, that sounds like it might be aligned with the theme (and title) of the Rolf Dobelli book I read early last year, called STOP READING THE NEWS (review here). As I sometimes do, I haven’t actually read the article yet, but am sitting down to do so while writing this blog post.
The Conversation, Ralph Hertwig et al, 2 Feb 2023: When critical thinking isn’t enough: to beat information overload, we need to learn ‘critical ignoring’
The article is 6 screens long. It opens with these fair statements.
The web is an informational paradise and a hellscape at the same time.
A boundless wealth of high-quality information is available at our fingertips right next to a ceaseless torrent of low-quality, distracting, false and manipulative information.
The platforms that control search were conceived in sin. Their business model auctions off our most precious and limited cognitive resource: attention. These platforms work overtime to hijack our attention by purveying information that arouses curiosity, outrage, or anger. The more our eyeballs remain glued to the screen, the more ads they can show us, and the greater profits accrue to their shareholders.
Then it refers to a *previous* article by one of these writers — Sam Wineburg — published back in May 2021: To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring
The main point of both articles is to avoid jumping straight to reading a new article, to “closely and carefully read” it as they teach in school, and first check out the source. More broadly, the three “tools for critical ignoring” are these:
- Self-nudging: Design your own informational environment by removing distractions, setting times for receiving messages, and so on;
- Lateral reading: Check out the credibility of online information before “closely and carefully” reading it;
- Do-not-feed-the-trolls: Do not respond to trolling (like invitations from science denialists to debate), do not respond, do not retaliate, but perhaps block and report trolls.
The philosopher Michael Lynch has noted that the Internet “is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer – often at the same time.”
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Hmm, I think I’ve more-or-less done these things over the years by refining a set of what I regard as trustworthy sources, a dozen or so news and opinion sites, a dozen or so individuals whose blogs and personal sites I check. I click on unknown things on Facebook very rarely. And Facebook has learned this and now shows me only stuff I’m likely to click on. (The exception there is the video channel, which is occasionally showing me flat earth apologists, who knows why. Maybe just because they’re hilarious.)
This site, The Conversation? I’ve seen it before; I’ve even linked to it at least once before (here, 17 Nov 2021), and today — admittedly, after reading these articles — checked out its Wikipedia page. Seems legit and trustworthy.
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Of course, this issue can be addressed more broadly. The surfeit of information on the internet, and via social media, is a distraction. Thus, I spend far too much time following the political landscape in the US, noting links and commenting about them on this blog, than there is any point in doing so. Very few read this blog (actually when I looked it was a couple hundred a day, which is surprising), and my family has de-friended me. (I can only assume the worst.) In this sense I’m inclined toward Rolf Dobelli’s recommendation. My justification for keeping doing so is that my broader interests, in science fiction and its context of human psychology and the deep history of the human race, inform the current political issues in ways most people (especially the dumb-as-a-rock Trump supporters, which Facebook gleefully keeps showing me videos of) have no clue about. But wouldn’t my time would be better spent working on the projects I’ve been pursuing over by past 7 or 20 years, which only I can do, and which some not insignificant number of people would find interesting, even valuable?
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A new back-of-envelope timeline, on my thoughts in recent days, oldest to newest:
- Savannah/tribal morality, as depicted in the Bible, and common until a few centuries ago;
- Enlightenment, scientific revolution;
- American revolution, French revolution, industrial revolution;
- Slaves freed, women granted the vote, civil rights;
- The resurgence of Savannah/tribal morality, in the US and elsewhere around the globe;
- Emergence of global problems that cannot be solved by tribes, but only through global cooperation.
