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Vraxx | 7 years ago

I think that's just confirmation bias working in tandem with the amnesia effect described, but certainly it is a valid point. To me, the hardest part about this problem is that trust tends to be stored (at least in my brain) as a binary yes or no, though possibly with a fuzzy border and some room in the middle. It's tough for me to read something and internally modify my trust of the source by a proportional amount for getting things "right" that I "know" when even what I know is uncertain because I could be wrong.

The end effect is that I tend to double check just about any source, but I still have a handful of sources that I have strong reason to believe their motives are compromised on various topics where I expect their motive to conflict with the motive to tell the truth. It's still not great though because sources rarely move up in this system and frequently move down, which leads in a general inability to find information considered trustworthy. This works fine on things where there is a general consensus because I'll be able to find a varied set of sources saying the same thing, but not so great on hotly debated topics with lots of nuance. Also sometimes my brain is lazy and I don't do any of this processing because I'm an imperfect human.

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