7 ms·

Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens

throwshakalaka 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ebiester 4y ago
  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.
  - frostburg 4y ago
    Not merely an opinion but an opinion on a deeply unimportant but politically strategic wedge issue.
    - ebiester 4y ago
      Unfortunately, the other comment was flagged, but I think this is important because it does highlight the difference between fact, values, social constructions, and opinions. I agree that men should not win women's beauty contests. That is opinion. However, trans women are women, not men. This is neither opinion nor fact in the strictest sense, and where nuance gets interesting. First, you have to understand the difference between sex and gender. Biological sex is not binary, but it's pretty close. Intersex people exist and are often pushed into the binary, though that's changing. Anne Fausto-Sterling asserts that if you add all people who deviate from biological binary sex, you get to about 1.7% of live births. However, there are a lot of ways to compute this number and this would be considered an upper bound. Many of these people are assigned male or female at birth, but it's a factual misunderstanding. What is interesting here, however, is that even though we could count the number of people who deviate from sex norms, we have trouble identifying who "counts" as intersex. For example, people with Klinefelter syndrome have XXY chromosomes. They are generally counted as male in our system, but we are outside facts now. Do you count a woman as someone with two X chromosomes? If so, this "man" is a "woman." So even with something as cut and dried as physical sex, we can't get to "facts" because we are working with classifications, and classifications are social constructions and not facts. Now, we get to the split between biological sex and gender. Gender refers to the role of someone in society. There's no functional reason why we should have two genders in a society, or that they should align with sex. When I say that trans women are women, I am making an argument of social construction, not of "fact." "Murder is wrong" is a social construction based on a value system, not a fact. Trans and non-binary genders are speaking to a social construction and role in society rather than a biological sex, but what we do know is that many people do not fit the social constructions of the gender closest to their biological sex. So, yes, I think a biological male should be able to win a beauty pageant for those in the woman gender. But I want to say that that is opinion based on social construction based on an understanding of the facts of sex and gender. And this is for those who are interested but do not fully understand the difference. This ignores "overweight" and "ugly", because both of those are social constructions with regard to beauty and is not an interesting conversation to me.
      - magicalhippo 4y ago
        > So, yes, I think a biological male should be able to win a beauty pageant for those in the woman gender. And for consistency, that should go for sports as well of course.
        frostburg 4y ago
        Yes. It's not like professional sport is important.
  - throwshakalaka 4y ago
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      If that one person agreed with your opinion, that still wouldn’t turn it into a fact.
      - throwshakalaka 4y ago
        How about you?
        bee_rider 4y ago
        What about me? My opinions also aren’t facts, if that is what you are asking. Maybe there’s a pattern here?
- savant_penguin 4y ago
  It's usually people who _really_ want to decide what can be said
- brippalcharrid 4y ago
  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."
  - swayvil 4y ago
    Speak to any common ideologue, be it religious, political, or some flavor oriented upon the latest health hullabaloo. Their arguments are invariably authoritarian. Empiricism, science... they aren't really a tool in your average person's epistemological toolbox. The 99% is as boneheadedly authoritarian today as it was 1000 years ago
- lm28469 4y ago
  Why did you create a throwaway account to post that ? If you can't assume your comments it usually is a good sign you shouldn't post them
alexb_ 4y ago
>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.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  Reminds me of the truly chilling statement from New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern: "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.
  - vinay427 4y ago
    Your quote feels deceptively lacking in context. In particular, the second part ("Unless... truth") is in response to a direct question about a viral hoax that suggested an imminent lockdown. It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies, just as it seems reasonable that a news reporter's publications should remain the source of truth on that reporter's writing and perspectives. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      Agree to disagree that the fluff in the middle of the statement matters. You did just link a snopes "fact-check" that agrees that, "Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth'?", is correctly attributed. The rest of the article is spin, as is often the case with snopes. The truth is independent of any political or journalistic entity. It's incredibly naive to think that self-appointed arbiters of truth will stop at one issue, the one that you happen to agree with them on.
      - 4y ago
swayvil 4y ago
If you are already "critically paying attention" (upon whatever task, puzzle, entertainment...) Then the "critical ignoring" happens automatically. So one path to "critical ignoring" would be to fill your life with beneficial busy-ness.
laserlight 4y ago
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.
nicbou 4y ago
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.
- lm28469 4y ago
  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
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Once I start, I struggle to stop. I used an ad blocker to remove pagination, and tightly filtered the content I follow. However, I struggle to limit myself to a few minutes when I have something unpleasant to do.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
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.
- ideonexus 4y ago
  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: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121570 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121...
sun_har 4y ago
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! Highly recommend.
medellin 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kthejoker2 4y ago
(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.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  I strongly disagree on point 1. Truth (or even mere evenhandedness) is very valuable to at least some people.
  - kthejoker2 4y ago
    I should clarify: truth isn't valuable to people producing content. Clickbait, controversy, contrarianism, drama, bullshit are equally valuable, and are much easier to produce than the truth.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ebiester 4y ago
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.
- frostburg 4y ago
  Not merely an opinion but an opinion on a deeply unimportant but politically strategic wedge issue.
  - ebiester 4y ago
    Unfortunately, the other comment was flagged, but I think this is important because it does highlight the difference between fact, values, social constructions, and opinions. I agree that men should not win women's beauty contests. That is opinion. However, trans women are women, not men. This is neither opinion nor fact in the strictest sense, and where nuance gets interesting. First, you have to understand the difference between sex and gender. Biological sex is not binary, but it's pretty close. Intersex people exist and are often pushed into the binary, though that's changing. Anne Fausto-Sterling asserts that if you add all people who deviate from biological binary sex, you get to about 1.7% of live births. However, there are a lot of ways to compute this number and this would be considered an upper bound. Many of these people are assigned male or female at birth, but it's a factual misunderstanding. What is interesting here, however, is that even though we could count the number of people who deviate from sex norms, we have trouble identifying who "counts" as intersex. For example, people with Klinefelter syndrome have XXY chromosomes. They are generally counted as male in our system, but we are outside facts now. Do you count a woman as someone with two X chromosomes? If so, this "man" is a "woman." So even with something as cut and dried as physical sex, we can't get to "facts" because we are working with classifications, and classifications are social constructions and not facts. Now, we get to the split between biological sex and gender. Gender refers to the role of someone in society. There's no functional reason why we should have two genders in a society, or that they should align with sex. When I say that trans women are women, I am making an argument of social construction, not of "fact." "Murder is wrong" is a social construction based on a value system, not a fact. Trans and non-binary genders are speaking to a social construction and role in society rather than a biological sex, but what we do know is that many people do not fit the social constructions of the gender closest to their biological sex. So, yes, I think a biological male should be able to win a beauty pageant for those in the woman gender. But I want to say that that is opinion based on social construction based on an understanding of the facts of sex and gender. And this is for those who are interested but do not fully understand the difference. This ignores "overweight" and "ugly", because both of those are social constructions with regard to beauty and is not an interesting conversation to me.
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      > So, yes, I think a biological male should be able to win a beauty pageant for those in the woman gender. And for consistency, that should go for sports as well of course.
      - frostburg 4y ago
        Yes. It's not like professional sport is important.
- throwshakalaka 4y ago
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    If that one person agreed with your opinion, that still wouldn’t turn it into a fact.
    - throwshakalaka 4y ago
      How about you?
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        What about me? My opinions also aren’t facts, if that is what you are asking. Maybe there’s a pattern here?
savant_penguin 4y ago
It's usually people who _really_ want to decide what can be said
brippalcharrid 4y ago
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."
- swayvil 4y ago
  Speak to any common ideologue, be it religious, political, or some flavor oriented upon the latest health hullabaloo. Their arguments are invariably authoritarian. Empiricism, science... they aren't really a tool in your average person's epistemological toolbox. The 99% is as boneheadedly authoritarian today as it was 1000 years ago
lm28469 4y ago
Why did you create a throwaway account to post that ? If you can't assume your comments it usually is a good sign you shouldn't post them

>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.

chitowneats 4y ago
Reminds me of the truly chilling statement from New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern: "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.
- vinay427 4y ago
  Your quote feels deceptively lacking in context. In particular, the second part ("Unless... truth") is in response to a direct question about a viral hoax that suggested an imminent lockdown. It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies, just as it seems reasonable that a news reporter's publications should remain the source of truth on that reporter's writing and perspectives. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    Agree to disagree that the fluff in the middle of the statement matters. You did just link a snopes "fact-check" that agrees that, "Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth'?", is correctly attributed. The rest of the article is spin, as is often the case with snopes. The truth is independent of any political or journalistic entity. It's incredibly naive to think that self-appointed arbiters of truth will stop at one issue, the one that you happen to agree with them on.
    - 4y ago

swayvil 4y ago

If you are already "critically paying attention" (upon whatever task, puzzle, entertainment...) Then the "critical ignoring" happens automatically. So one path to "critical ignoring" would be to fill your life with beneficial busy-ness.

laserlight 4y ago

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.

nicbou 4y ago

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.

lm28469 4y ago
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
- nicbou 4y ago
  Once I start, I struggle to stop. I used an ad blocker to remove pagination, and tightly filtered the content I follow. However, I struggle to limit myself to a few minutes when I have something unpleasant to do.

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

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.

ideonexus 4y ago
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: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121570 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214221121...

sun_har 4y ago

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! Highly recommend.

medellin 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kthejoker2 4y ago

(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.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
I strongly disagree on point 1. Truth (or even mere evenhandedness) is very valuable to at least some people.
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  I should clarify: truth isn't valuable to people producing content. Clickbait, controversy, contrarianism, drama, bullshit are equally valuable, and are much easier to produce than the truth.