«You can go to source material, as an example. (It's fascinating that you can get a wealth of #s through government stats gatherers that directly contradicts or undermines the media agenda.»
Let's say I am familiar with how Economists "work". The good ones always look at the primary sources and question them, because many "processed" stat…
«You can go to source material, as an example. (It's fascinating that you can get a wealth of #s through government stats gatherers that directly contradicts or undermines the media agenda.»
Let's say I am familiar with how Economists "work". The good ones always look at the primary sources and question them, because many "processed" statistics are biased, and even the raw data collected is biased (often accidentally). Then they publish their results in obscure journals using heavily obfuscated language as the results are often detrimental to careers in departments of Economics heavily dependent on donations from the wealthy and business research contracts.
«They think you won't check)»
Of course they are right: almost everything we know as individuals is hearsay, inevitably, and therefore people's minds are predisposed to apply only rule-of-thumb checks to hearsay, being unable to verify it.
The most common rule-of-thumb applied by our minds is to trust that hearsay which seems repeated by multiple sources that seem independent. So for example if one person says "I saw John bribing Bob" is not trusted as much as a dozen people saying "I saw Jack/Jane/Bill/Kate/... bribing Bob".
So the "mainstream" ("centrist"/"whig"/right-wing) media rely on faking that: they repeat each other's talking points as if each were an independent witness. Sometimes it is just implicit collusion, sometimes it is explicit, as in when they repeat almost word for word the same implausible conspiracy theories as if they were all making a summary from a briefing from some security agency or another.
Agreed. I will say that I recognize even primary sources have inherent biases built in and and are imperfect. The methodology behind studies is also useful to check and try to cross-reference. As humans, we rarely can have perfect information or the "truth." But, we can come a LOT closer to reality by digging in by ourselves, verifying, checking and doing our own witnessing. One thing that I realize is that part of the "news" today is trying to get you to deny what you have seen or heard yourself. So, a big part of "detoxing" from that is trusting your own eyes and ears too. Problem is that if you think about a generation or two past and generations going forward, they have not/are not taught critical thinking or independent research skills (deliberately). So, we have millions of people who, very literally, can't do this work on their own.
«You can go to source material, as an example. (It's fascinating that you can get a wealth of #s through government stats gatherers that directly contradicts or undermines the media agenda.»
Let's say I am familiar with how Economists "work". The good ones always look at the primary sources and question them, because many "processed" statistics are biased, and even the raw data collected is biased (often accidentally). Then they publish their results in obscure journals using heavily obfuscated language as the results are often detrimental to careers in departments of Economics heavily dependent on donations from the wealthy and business research contracts.
«They think you won't check)»
Of course they are right: almost everything we know as individuals is hearsay, inevitably, and therefore people's minds are predisposed to apply only rule-of-thumb checks to hearsay, being unable to verify it.
The most common rule-of-thumb applied by our minds is to trust that hearsay which seems repeated by multiple sources that seem independent. So for example if one person says "I saw John bribing Bob" is not trusted as much as a dozen people saying "I saw Jack/Jane/Bill/Kate/... bribing Bob".
So the "mainstream" ("centrist"/"whig"/right-wing) media rely on faking that: they repeat each other's talking points as if each were an independent witness. Sometimes it is just implicit collusion, sometimes it is explicit, as in when they repeat almost word for word the same implausible conspiracy theories as if they were all making a summary from a briefing from some security agency or another.
Agreed. I will say that I recognize even primary sources have inherent biases built in and and are imperfect. The methodology behind studies is also useful to check and try to cross-reference. As humans, we rarely can have perfect information or the "truth." But, we can come a LOT closer to reality by digging in by ourselves, verifying, checking and doing our own witnessing. One thing that I realize is that part of the "news" today is trying to get you to deny what you have seen or heard yourself. So, a big part of "detoxing" from that is trusting your own eyes and ears too. Problem is that if you think about a generation or two past and generations going forward, they have not/are not taught critical thinking or independent research skills (deliberately). So, we have millions of people who, very literally, can't do this work on their own.
"So, we have millions of people who, very literally, can't do this work on their own."
Wait 10-20ish years until we have a whole cohort of people educated only by Zoom classes and Youtube. Generation A is coming!