Kind of a non-sequitor, but there is one specific tool that has helped me break out of my smartphone addiction: books! The process is simple:
1. Leave phone somewhere not in my pocket and not within reach
2. Always have a book handy in my free time.
At least in my case, reaching for and reading my phone happens pre-cognition. It's completely automatic. I've found that I enjoy reading just as much, but unless I plan for it I don't have a book in reach. So the solution has been pretty simple: keep a book in reach!
>In the case of sources that we cannot verify, [general suspicion] is indeed advisable. Conversely, however, we should also consider in a positive sense who we can trust. Especially here in Europe, there are many trustworthy media and institutions: the public broadcasters or the major daily newspapers.
I don't really like how this is said as if it is 100% true, like "trustworthy media and institutions" are things you shouldn't be generally suspicious of.
I'm not a fan of this either. In addition to what you've said, it ignores that one reason these 'alternative' sites have been so successful is that they often are good at pointing out the mistakes and misleading nature of mainstream institutions. That's often how they grow an initial trusting audience to begin with, and why they can so successfully bang the drum of 'don't trust the mainstream media': Often that media isn't trustworthy.
My go to is how the mainstream media treated the war in Iraq when it was started. Of course Iraq has WMDs; the President says so. The only counter examples I found at the time were from online orgs and discussions back before those were as prominent.
"Just trust us" isn't a good reaction to the current problem. If some institution wants to be trusted, they have to actually be trustworthy, but that takes $$ and effort. Which is not supported in the current landscape.
Major news organizations lie by omission and innuendo. Random people on the internet lie by making stuff up. You shouldn’t trust major news outlets to give you a clear picture of the world, but they can be generally trusted as a source of verifiable fact, even if an incomplete one.
I saw nothing in the interview to indicate that you should accept 100% of statements mainstream media institutions. Quite the opposite.
You do need to be able to evaluate relative trustworthiness. Mainstream journalism isn't going to be right 100% of the time, but they have a much better track record than rumors spread over social media. In fact, because so many contradictory stories spread on the internet, it's easy to pick ones we want to believe and reject ones that challenge our assumptions. It becomes easy to reject an uncomfortable reality and substitute one that make us feel better about ourselves. So while you should be generally suspicious of "trustworthy media and institutions" you should be very suspicious of your own biases.
A healthy dose of skepticism doesn't mean disbelieving all sources equally.
>I don't really like how this is said as if it is 100% true
I don't see it as being said that way. What was said was, "we should also consider in a positive sense". That is more nuanced than automatic trust, it's more like giving the benefit of the doubt until shown otherwise.
If you are automatically and reflexively suspicious of all public broadcasters and major daily newspapers, then who are you not suspicious of?
When you're in a market sharing space with Infowars and the Buffalo Chronicle, yes the mainstream media and democratically-funded government institutions are generally a hell of a lot more trustworthy.
On "skepticism", people who are inherently distrustful of mainstream institutions tend to be shockingly credulous of fringe people with even less credibility, which is generally far worse.
They're comparatively a lot more trustworthy than anyone decrying the evils of the "MSM", despite serious issues and systematic bias. At the very least, you mostly know who they are.
One of the problems is that the media are not principled. Instead they have agendas and those agendas change over time. This time they are pro-war, the next time they are anti-war, not because of underlying principle (we're against bad guys --however that's defined) but because they advance some second or third order thing they agree or disagree with.
While private media in Germany is diverse, German public broadcast has a strong left bias. Besides surveys of people working there, there will be a lot German lefties who claim otherwise. (maybe here too?)
It's hard to do this when feeds are shoved into every crevice of our digital existence. It took me some time to turn all of those off.
Then it gets pretty quiet, but you're still left to figure out what to do when you're too tired for constructive hobbies. There are cracks in the day that low effort media fills really well.
You don't really have to be busy 24/7 though. Taking 10-15 min here and there to just do nothing and breath is quite nice. Or pickup a book if you really need to get your brain busy. Anything but doomscrolling social media
(This comment brought to you by a verifiable human with real biases free of charge by Y Combinator.)
I think it's much simpler to start with a risk-based calculation. That is, you have to evaluate what the "risk" of believing something is, which fundamentally is "what harm will there be if I act as if this is true but it is not" (severity) times "the probability that this thing is not true." (likelihood)
And then when you take the two part proposition that
1) In the attention economy, truth or evenhandedness is not valuable.
There are many people who will gladly and purposely mislead you to gain your attention, influence, votes, dollars, and (in extreme cases) your permission to commit and/or condone violence, crime, hate, etc. against others.
That is, the likelihood that what you are reading is not true (by commission or omission) is very high. At best, it will be partially to mostly true.
2) Most people view content as a form of wish fulfillment, not critical analysis. They're happy to delude themselves and avoid any introspection that what they believe is wrong.
That is, they completely discount the severity of believing something not true. They've already "amortized" that into their decision to read the content they do - they know it agrees with their beliefs (even if they're both wrong.) And even if it is a bit wrong or extreme, see point #1: so is everything else on the Internet.
It's easy to see it has nothing to do with "critical" "ignoring" - most people have already done a very uncritical "ignoring" at a macro level by creating filter bubbles and only see things they want to see, and those spaces are saturated with folks from #1 who convert that wish fulfillment into revenue streams.
No easy answers here, we're tribal apes navigating a low-trust environment.
First, there is no "fact" in there. "Should" by inference points you to an opinion rather than fact.
Fact: Some roses are red.
Opinion: Roses should be red.
Considering that your example of a "fact" starts with an opinion, we don't have much to go off of.
We can get into nuanced comment of fact versus opinion, how facts are mediated through our biases to color our conclusions, or how with many facts we are dealing with statistical models rather than physical laws of the universe, how our biases and collection models can lead us to inaccuracies in what we consider true, or how social truths are only as true as our belief in them, but if we can't even get the difference between fact and opinion, I hold no hope for such nuance.
Don't worry, you will increasingly find that there are trusted media and scientific sources who will tell what it's acceptable to think. Otherwise, people will be at risk of reaching different conclusions.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
What a BS term. As far as I understood, there's nothing critical nor ignoring about it. But we have to come up with cool-sounding buzzwords for marketing's sake. What they call critical ignoring is about being intentional with the way you live your life and not drifting into whatever way your environment pulls you.
It’s not about sources. Yes that is important but having our anger pointed in a different direction every day/week seems extremely problematic. It’s about learning to ignore those sensation stories that are going to disappear in a week or two and focusing on what YOU care about.
It’s made worse by outspoken online groups liking to claim moral superiority by caring about “everything” and then forcing it other with things like “anti-racism”. It’s no longer enough to be concise of your bias and work on that… no you now need to actively be doing anti-racist things which is entirely dependent on some tiny group of people.
The goalposts just keep moving and you just need to ignore this toxic online discourse. At the end of the day it really is just to made to divide.
I was looking forward to some well thought out strategy to manage the volume of information that I receive.
Alas, this article provided nothing to me but alarm bells, even based on the article's own method of validation. For example, the Dr. Kozyreva wrote several articles on "critical ignoring", yet none of them are referenced. No claims are actually referenced.
The "lateral reading" immediately set alarms off in my mind, and I think the recommendation is diametrically opposed to how I believe we should read news.
It recommends to do "what fact checkers" do.
> Normally we read a website from top to bottom. That's how we learn it in school: to critically examine a text by going through it very carefully from beginning to end. Fact checkers proceed differently: they open another tab in the browser - i.e. sideways - and do internet searches on who’s behind the website. There are an astonishing number of sites that make themselves appear legitimate, but are in fact backed by lobby groups, for example from industry, who try to influence public opinion in this way.
In short I interpret this as - abandon the albeit slow, but well thought out scientific method. Trust other sources to make the judgement for you. The author & affiliation are the primary driver of the decision, irrelevant of the validity of the claim itself.
Horrifying. According to this, "fact checkers" do not check facts, only who makes the claim, irrelevant of the claim's veracity.
Here's the journal article that the OP is based on. It's not concrete, but it does identify several kinds of distracting information. After reading the article I did begin deliberately ignoring much of my social media and low-quality news sites:
[+] [-] sun_har|3 years ago|reply
1. Leave phone somewhere not in my pocket and not within reach 2. Always have a book handy in my free time.
At least in my case, reaching for and reading my phone happens pre-cognition. It's completely automatic. I've found that I enjoy reading just as much, but unless I plan for it I don't have a book in reach. So the solution has been pretty simple: keep a book in reach!
Highly recommend.
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
I don't really like how this is said as if it is 100% true, like "trustworthy media and institutions" are things you shouldn't be generally suspicious of.
[+] [-] Mezzie|3 years ago|reply
My go to is how the mainstream media treated the war in Iraq when it was started. Of course Iraq has WMDs; the President says so. The only counter examples I found at the time were from online orgs and discussions back before those were as prominent.
"Just trust us" isn't a good reaction to the current problem. If some institution wants to be trusted, they have to actually be trustworthy, but that takes $$ and effort. Which is not supported in the current landscape.
[+] [-] cirgue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loudmax|3 years ago|reply
You do need to be able to evaluate relative trustworthiness. Mainstream journalism isn't going to be right 100% of the time, but they have a much better track record than rumors spread over social media. In fact, because so many contradictory stories spread on the internet, it's easy to pick ones we want to believe and reject ones that challenge our assumptions. It becomes easy to reject an uncomfortable reality and substitute one that make us feel better about ourselves. So while you should be generally suspicious of "trustworthy media and institutions" you should be very suspicious of your own biases.
A healthy dose of skepticism doesn't mean disbelieving all sources equally.
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|3 years ago|reply
I don't see it as being said that way. What was said was, "we should also consider in a positive sense". That is more nuanced than automatic trust, it's more like giving the benefit of the doubt until shown otherwise.
If you are automatically and reflexively suspicious of all public broadcasters and major daily newspapers, then who are you not suspicious of?
[+] [-] Pxtl|3 years ago|reply
On "skepticism", people who are inherently distrustful of mainstream institutions tend to be shockingly credulous of fringe people with even less credibility, which is generally far worse.
[+] [-] frostburg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chitowneats|3 years ago|reply
"We will continue to be your single source of truth...Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth."
Xi Jingping must be proud that his thought is becoming so widespread.
[+] [-] snowpid|3 years ago|reply
Shortly I dont trust German public broadcast.
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
Then it gets pretty quiet, but you're still left to figure out what to do when you're too tired for constructive hobbies. There are cracks in the day that low effort media fills really well.
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kthejoker2|3 years ago|reply
I think it's much simpler to start with a risk-based calculation. That is, you have to evaluate what the "risk" of believing something is, which fundamentally is "what harm will there be if I act as if this is true but it is not" (severity) times "the probability that this thing is not true." (likelihood)
And then when you take the two part proposition that
1) In the attention economy, truth or evenhandedness is not valuable.
There are many people who will gladly and purposely mislead you to gain your attention, influence, votes, dollars, and (in extreme cases) your permission to commit and/or condone violence, crime, hate, etc. against others.
That is, the likelihood that what you are reading is not true (by commission or omission) is very high. At best, it will be partially to mostly true.
2) Most people view content as a form of wish fulfillment, not critical analysis. They're happy to delude themselves and avoid any introspection that what they believe is wrong.
That is, they completely discount the severity of believing something not true. They've already "amortized" that into their decision to read the content they do - they know it agrees with their beliefs (even if they're both wrong.) And even if it is a bit wrong or extreme, see point #1: so is everything else on the Internet.
It's easy to see it has nothing to do with "critical" "ignoring" - most people have already done a very uncritical "ignoring" at a macro level by creating filter bubbles and only see things they want to see, and those spaces are saturated with folks from #1 who convert that wish fulfillment into revenue streams.
No easy answers here, we're tribal apes navigating a low-trust environment.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swayvil|3 years ago|reply
So one path to "critical ignoring" would be to fill your life with beneficial busy-ness.
[+] [-] throwshakalaka|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ebiester|3 years ago|reply
Fact: Some roses are red. Opinion: Roses should be red.
Considering that your example of a "fact" starts with an opinion, we don't have much to go off of.
We can get into nuanced comment of fact versus opinion, how facts are mediated through our biases to color our conclusions, or how with many facts we are dealing with statistical models rather than physical laws of the universe, how our biases and collection models can lead us to inaccuracies in what we consider true, or how social truths are only as true as our belief in them, but if we can't even get the difference between fact and opinion, I hold no hope for such nuance.
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] savant_penguin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brippalcharrid|3 years ago|reply
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
[+] [-] laserlight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] medellin|3 years ago|reply
It’s made worse by outspoken online groups liking to claim moral superiority by caring about “everything” and then forcing it other with things like “anti-racism”. It’s no longer enough to be concise of your bias and work on that… no you now need to actively be doing anti-racist things which is entirely dependent on some tiny group of people.
The goalposts just keep moving and you just need to ignore this toxic online discourse. At the end of the day it really is just to made to divide.
[+] [-] WaitWaitWha|3 years ago|reply
Alas, this article provided nothing to me but alarm bells, even based on the article's own method of validation. For example, the Dr. Kozyreva wrote several articles on "critical ignoring", yet none of them are referenced. No claims are actually referenced.
The "lateral reading" immediately set alarms off in my mind, and I think the recommendation is diametrically opposed to how I believe we should read news.
It recommends to do "what fact checkers" do.
> Normally we read a website from top to bottom. That's how we learn it in school: to critically examine a text by going through it very carefully from beginning to end. Fact checkers proceed differently: they open another tab in the browser - i.e. sideways - and do internet searches on who’s behind the website. There are an astonishing number of sites that make themselves appear legitimate, but are in fact backed by lobby groups, for example from industry, who try to influence public opinion in this way.
In short I interpret this as - abandon the albeit slow, but well thought out scientific method. Trust other sources to make the judgement for you. The author & affiliation are the primary driver of the decision, irrelevant of the validity of the claim itself.
Horrifying. According to this, "fact checkers" do not check facts, only who makes the claim, irrelevant of the claim's veracity.
[+] [-] ideonexus|3 years ago|reply
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121...