People need to learn to start forming their own opinions and not being so easily influenced by who said what and thinking about the what itself.
Lately I've been wondering if maybe people evolved to be sensitive to the who to make it easier for us to be controlled. Said control can be useful at times.
Having to form an opinion about every damn thing that matters is a) exhausting and b) hubris.
It is not possible to be an expert on everything.
The best personal outcome doesn't come from making your own assessment of everything from toothpaste to nuclear power. It's when you learn to recognise the difference between someone's reasoned expertise and, well, just about everyone else pushing their viewpoint.
The top current tip for removing noise from signal certainly is, don't consume social media, as in the OP. In a similar vein, ignore parochial/domestic television broadcasting; obtain current events from international reporting sources, and informed opinion from long-form writers.
>Having to form an opinion about every damn thing that matters is a) exhausting and b) hubris. It is not possible to be an expert on everything.
That's a cynical take, and it illuminates the importance of good education, so that "hubris" as you put it is minimized and right judgment is maximized.
Even more important when most children's education is more and more geared away from critical thinking, and instead towards the One True History.
Someone stated everyone in the US has an opinion. He wrote a book that sold well and was carrying copies to the US, the worker there took a look at his cargo and exclaimed "nobody will buy it". Do we really need opinions on everything?
To look at a thing, to think about what you see (or not). That's one way.
To consume words, interpret them, to create a metaphorical story. That's another.
That's a big difference. Fire vs fireflies.
It isn't a matter of truthiness but of substance.
The difference between menu and lunch. If the question is what to order, what course of action to take, maybe it doesn't matter so much. But for understanding it matters a whole bunch.
Trust attributed via a trusted proxy is not an invalid strategy.
We don't have time to verify everything. Once you've rediscovered fire and are finishing up on reinventing the wheel, you come a point where you've got to delegate some tasks to others, perhaps trust them. And if you trust them, you probably impart some of the trust in their character to the opinion they utter. Nothing wrong in that.
There's reality. And then there's the popular, authoritatively supported STORY about reality.
Most people seem to prefer the latter.
Truth becomes less about reality and more about power, then. Power is a big deal for most people. Look at popular movies for a clear illustration of that.
This can't happen because most people live in a reality that has been crafted by the media sources they consume. This reality provides the mental safety they have enjoyed for their entire lives and there is no reason to step outside of that bubble. I've had conversations with very successful and highly-educated people who can't come to terms with certain truths unless they are validated by "trusted media".
I'll be the first to say I was like this until only a few years ago. Once you realize that a significant chunk of mainstream media and social networks are heavily curated to influence your thinking, you never see the world the same again. There's a reason they call it being "red-pilled".
> Lately I've been wondering if maybe people evolved to be sensitive to the who to make it easier for us to be controlled. Said control can be useful at times.
Pretty sure we evolved to be both. A society cannot function without a lot of people who mostly just follow a leader, but any society which doesn't constantly question its beliefs and ideals is guaranteed to fall sooner or later so we also need a lot of contrarians who do ask all those questions.
I've been thinking this exact same thing too. But I think it is also a survival instinct. We don't just believe anyone, we believe those who we perceive to have more power, be it a violent mob demonstration, or someone we see on TV a lot.
Those in power are well aware of this. You will notice that all the propaganda on TV is designed to make people believe that "everyone believes what I believe, I am in the majority". And when election time comes and hard facts seem to prove the propaganda wrong, they very quickly pivot to "Ok sure, but those other people don't count, they are 'uneducate', 'poor', 'evil'... they have no power"
Abstract belief formation is a topic of study. The gist is: first we hear something, then we assume it's true, then we maybe vet it later. Multiple experiments seem to imply that the default state is believing.
There is too much information (and/or content) for this to be viable.
A hyperconsumer of information can handle somewhere in the range of 300--1,000 messages per day. The ultimate limit is simply time --- at 1,000 messages, and an 8-hour workday, you're dedicating 30 seconds per message, maximum. If you dedicate all your waking hours to that, you can double that. If you give up on sleep (I don't recommend this), triple.
There are hard limits.
30 seconds, or 60, or 90, is not enough time for a hard debunk.
And the alternative is simply to ... consume far fewer messages. Meaning that most of what flies by (much of it bogus) is ... unvetted. Dendritic information filters function by distributing the bullshit-filtering task across numerous nodes. In mass-media contexts of publishing or broadcast, that role was filled (with, very admittedly, problems) by reporters and editors. (See Noam Chomsky for what could possibly go worgn. It's still ... reasonably good, particularly with multiple press channels, say, those which include Noam Chomskys or George Seldes or I.F. Stoneses.)
In an environment with an overabundance of information what is required are fast, cheap, minimally-biased, no-regrets discarding mechanisms. Reputation and trust mechanisms afford much of this, which means that yes, the vast majority of people do trust others, either experts or collectively, at making useful partitions of the total information stream.
This is alway why known amplifiers or creators of bullshit <coff>joe<coff>rogan<coff> deserve to be dropped without any regrets.
(There are of course numerous others. That happens to be a channel specifically recommended in TFA, a fact which seriously degrades TFA's own credibility --- trust is not perfectly commutative, but it has transitive aspects.)
Incidentally, an advantage of choosing specific sources or channels is that those themselves can be examined and rated on their own performance. What's most critical is that sources afford cheap, fast, minimally-biased, and no-regrets performance. If a channel is tedious, if it is biased (and here, "bias" is based not on ideology but ground truth to the extent that that can be determined), if it produces regrets (choices are continuously second-guessed), then it is a poor option. Decisions aren't based on an ideal, but against alternatives.
Sources should own up to their own failings. I had a discussion a couple of months back on what such practices should, and do, look like (with someone apparently incapable of grasping the concepts, but that's another occupational hazard):
Lately I've been wondering if maybe people evolved to be sensitive to the who to make it easier for us to be controlled. Said control can be useful at times.