Life hacks #1 Sourcing information in a post truth digital age
And here we are…. shit that escalated quickly. We hope you, friends and family are all doing as well as can be expected in a time of health and economic upheaval. Given we are all in the same societal pandemic, it affords us time to ponder, worry, educate and discover through the prism of social isolation. I intend to arrive at the other side of the pandemic as a self-improved poet-knitting-ninja-philosopher……. or failing that, to have at least have read a bit and most likely be vitamin D deficient.
I put forward my ruminations that some might be interested in reading during COVID times. Applied caveats are:
I am not an expert in any life hacks
We are not sponsored by any of our subjects.
What are your thoughts on sourcing quality information in a post truth digital age I hear you say? The difficulty in navigating the online swamp that is the post truth world manifests in fatigue and nausea. How did the orange skinned village idiot get voted in to be the commander in chief of the United States of America? Actively undermining facts and evidence through malignant bluster has proven, to this point, to be quite effective. Nepotism over expertise is a dangerous way to run a powerful country. Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner is potentially the most dangerous man on the planet. Natalie Portman refers to Kush-man as a ‘supervillain.’ She would have extensive knowledge of things that were rotten to the core. She was in those Star Wars movies after all…..
The ethos of truth denialism is enabled by a lack of persistent scrutiny and accountability. It thrives in the fog of war and preys heavily on fear and stupidity. The majority outcome manifests in cognitive dissonance; a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance. For example, when people smoke (behaviour) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.
How on earth do we get back to facts and more truth you ask? Well one way to undo dissonant beliefs is to acquire information that outweighs the belief. So let’s say for argument sake, and to get all supervillains out of power, we’ll use the village idiot as an example.
Case study 1 Trump lies.
The man with the oompa loompa complexion has an exhausting ability to lie. The Washington post has clocked him at 18,000 false or misleading claims in 1,170 days. The guy gives definition to being a Mythomaniac (thanks Google). Let’s just use the glaringly obvious lies that Trump conveys to prove a point:
1. Trump believes he has either normal sized or larger than normal sized hands.
2. Trump has a natural full head of hair.
Point 1 can be disproved by measuring his small hands. Proven.
Point 2 can be disproved by removing the hair clips, clouds of hair spray and flipping that dead mammal to the side to reveal male pattern baldness. Or you could just ask Ivanka . Well Proven.
Having dispelled the dissonant beliefs above, we are spurred on to read and digest more information that has a factual bent. In this regard, The Syllabus is a great site. It curates articles from a wide array of sources using algorithms and human editors that provide what we consider to be worth reading. That was a long preamble to get to this point, but if there’s one thing we have in the search for truth, it is time!
