3 ms·

This state of information isn't the least bit new, but for some reason many of us are treating it like it is. Wealthy families, corporations, politicians, bank

This state of information isn't the least bit new, but for some reason many of us are treating it like it is. Wealthy families, corporations, politicians, banks, and so on have always had their hands in what we get to see. The very idea that foreign enemy nations use propaganda has itself been used as a propaganda tactic many times. What's troublesome for the public is that the culture does not instill a healthy level of individualism when it comes to interpreting information; we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic. People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so. In actuality, this is nonsense, given how many people manage to at least pass through high school, and how much time adults spend consuming entertainment. In their defense, it takes an inordinate amount of work to sift through the detritus that makes up at least 80% of prose on the internet; most articles simply can't get to the point, but I guess creative writing majors need something to do. I truly think the best thing for the average person right now is to not take information-for-sale seriously. They are better off knowing less, not more. The idea that information has a linearly distributed benefit is a fallacy. The more information, the more vectors for pathological information.

chc 4y ago
Do you believe it is possible for one person to understand multiple topics in different fields as well as the experts in those fields? That seems like a massive unspoken assumption in your point of view here. If not, it seems like some level of trust in experts is the only possible way to know much about the world beyond the rudiments.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Yea, I always hear the "learn everything yourself, don't trust experts", and it makes little sense to me. I research an insane amount of things and read massive volumes of books, and videos on how to do things.... After this immense amount of learning I still know that I just know a drop in the bucket of what there is to know. I would have to just spend all my time learning, and I'd never get shit done Maybe what these people are trying to say poorly is "Try to learn enough about a topic that you can pick an actual expert out, rather than a bullshit salesman", but after talking to enough of these 'rugged individualist', I think what they are mostly saying (silently) is "Get ready to screw me over because I am massively over confident in my abilities"
  - singleshot_ 4y ago
    Learn everything yourself is such an insanely reductionist strategy. Through a limited dalliance with spaced repetition learning techniques, I came to believe research that suggests there a limit to how many discrete facts you can retain in your memory. Unfortunately the number of facts you’d need to retain to be an expert in hold to maturity securities, vaccines, the military capabilities of Ukraine, the intricacies of section 230, and Delaware corporate law and how it relates to broken acquisitions (just to name five examples of things that most people on this site think they know a lot about) would exhaust the most capable mind’s capacity.
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      > there a limit to how many discrete facts you can retain in your memory Yep. Once you've tried to train yourself on too much data, your brain begins to hallucinate facts (more) similarly to an LLM. You'll be able to reject (most of?) these hallucinations, but you won't really have all the facts anymore. I've tried to do this before and it doesn't end up with you being an expert in anything. It just ends up with you either being confused, or being confidently wrong. I hallucinate facts all the time.
  - maxslch 4y ago
    Imagine if there is a government funded, independent company that does the in depth fact checking and analysis on the important, mass consumed information pieces. How much would that cost to operate for the government? A few mils per year? That's nothing for the gov and imagine how much value would this company bring to people/nation/world. Maybe soon later we'll have an AI in place that would be checking whatever you're about to post/share and warn you, show you what you're posting from perspective you're not aware of etc.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  No, that is not what I am saying at all. Nobody has to learn everything, and 99.9% of information being sold is not actionable for the average person. There's a world of difference between treating experts as priests and considering what experts have to say while not blindingly believing them. I'm saying that they neither need to know very much nor offload all their reasoning to someone else. Plenty of experts speak inappropriately on topics outside their realm of expertise. The culture should encourage people to recognize when this happens and choose whether to dismiss the expert. A perfect example is many doctors, in particular M.D.s, who profess often foolish or obsolete views on things like nutrition, something which is not within the expertise of an M.D. The same goes for scientists commenting on politics, or science outside their domain of research. Or 20-something journalists making predictions about fields in which they've never actually practiced in. A significant amount of misinformation would be inoculated against with the recognition of misplaced authority and abuse of power. It's called not being so gullible, and it doesn't take that much general knowledge that the average human brain can't grasp it. I'm sorry if it comes off as the expectation that individuals be the experts in many fields themselves, because if that's where our imagination keeps taking us, then maybe there really is no hope.
- d0mine 4y ago
  This sounds plausible but directly contradicts the actual evidence about the best forecasters (according to David Epstein "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World").
photochemsyn 4y ago
Specialization in one area of information can be kind of rewarding. I like commodity news (oil, food, minerals, water, etc.) and tech manufacturing so I try to keep up on those areas. Mainstream media isn't really that great for this, in comparison to speciality business journals, various websites, government reports and so on. Focusing on one area gives you a 'window on reality', but it's going to be limited, i.e. I really don't know what to think about all the culture war news, or general finance that's not specifically related to commodities and manufacturing, or anything in the 'true crime' world, or much in the way of electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. Still, knowing something reliable about how droughts and floods have affected rice production in China and why rice prices are rising makes me feel like I have at least some marginal grasp on what's going on in the real world.
- HaZeust 4y ago
  Where do you go for oil commodity news, generally?
rektide 4y ago
> What's troublesome for the public is that the culture does not instill a healthy level of individualism when it comes to interpreting information; we are encouraged to trust experts To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy. The not-trusters seem most likely to fall for your wonderfully stated second idea, which I love, > People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so. The most vocal mainstream resistance seems extremely quick to accept & deeply believe alternate portrayals, ones that happen to fit the constructed narratives they want to believe. I think the mainstream actually does a much better job of having skeptical takes, but wow, our tolerance for the dreck demagoguery trash that people adopt has worn real thin.
- lenkite 4y ago
  > To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy. Many of these "batshit crazy" folks appear to have been correct in hindsight.
pixl97 4y ago
>People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own Knowing more is better, but has particular risks... https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 It has taken me years to become expert level in just the things I do, there is vast range of knowledge I have, and yet because of the knowledge I have, I know that I barely know shit. >we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic. This is what happens in the US because of our political system that loves turning everything in to L/R, Us/Them means of thinking.

chc 4y ago

Do you believe it is possible for one person to understand multiple topics in different fields as well as the experts in those fields? That seems like a massive unspoken assumption in your point of view here. If not, it seems like some level of trust in experts is the only possible way to know much about the world beyond the rudiments.

pixl97 4y ago
Yea, I always hear the "learn everything yourself, don't trust experts", and it makes little sense to me. I research an insane amount of things and read massive volumes of books, and videos on how to do things.... After this immense amount of learning I still know that I just know a drop in the bucket of what there is to know. I would have to just spend all my time learning, and I'd never get shit done Maybe what these people are trying to say poorly is "Try to learn enough about a topic that you can pick an actual expert out, rather than a bullshit salesman", but after talking to enough of these 'rugged individualist', I think what they are mostly saying (silently) is "Get ready to screw me over because I am massively over confident in my abilities"
- singleshot_ 4y ago
  Learn everything yourself is such an insanely reductionist strategy. Through a limited dalliance with spaced repetition learning techniques, I came to believe research that suggests there a limit to how many discrete facts you can retain in your memory. Unfortunately the number of facts you’d need to retain to be an expert in hold to maturity securities, vaccines, the military capabilities of Ukraine, the intricacies of section 230, and Delaware corporate law and how it relates to broken acquisitions (just to name five examples of things that most people on this site think they know a lot about) would exhaust the most capable mind’s capacity.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    > there a limit to how many discrete facts you can retain in your memory Yep. Once you've tried to train yourself on too much data, your brain begins to hallucinate facts (more) similarly to an LLM. You'll be able to reject (most of?) these hallucinations, but you won't really have all the facts anymore. I've tried to do this before and it doesn't end up with you being an expert in anything. It just ends up with you either being confused, or being confidently wrong. I hallucinate facts all the time.
- maxslch 4y ago
  Imagine if there is a government funded, independent company that does the in depth fact checking and analysis on the important, mass consumed information pieces. How much would that cost to operate for the government? A few mils per year? That's nothing for the gov and imagine how much value would this company bring to people/nation/world. Maybe soon later we'll have an AI in place that would be checking whatever you're about to post/share and warn you, show you what you're posting from perspective you're not aware of etc.
ravenstine 4y ago
No, that is not what I am saying at all. Nobody has to learn everything, and 99.9% of information being sold is not actionable for the average person. There's a world of difference between treating experts as priests and considering what experts have to say while not blindingly believing them. I'm saying that they neither need to know very much nor offload all their reasoning to someone else. Plenty of experts speak inappropriately on topics outside their realm of expertise. The culture should encourage people to recognize when this happens and choose whether to dismiss the expert. A perfect example is many doctors, in particular M.D.s, who profess often foolish or obsolete views on things like nutrition, something which is not within the expertise of an M.D. The same goes for scientists commenting on politics, or science outside their domain of research. Or 20-something journalists making predictions about fields in which they've never actually practiced in. A significant amount of misinformation would be inoculated against with the recognition of misplaced authority and abuse of power. It's called not being so gullible, and it doesn't take that much general knowledge that the average human brain can't grasp it. I'm sorry if it comes off as the expectation that individuals be the experts in many fields themselves, because if that's where our imagination keeps taking us, then maybe there really is no hope.
d0mine 4y ago
This sounds plausible but directly contradicts the actual evidence about the best forecasters (according to David Epstein "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World").

photochemsyn 4y ago

Specialization in one area of information can be kind of rewarding. I like commodity news (oil, food, minerals, water, etc.) and tech manufacturing so I try to keep up on those areas. Mainstream media isn't really that great for this, in comparison to speciality business journals, various websites, government reports and so on. Focusing on one area gives you a 'window on reality', but it's going to be limited, i.e. I really don't know what to think about all the culture war news, or general finance that's not specifically related to commodities and manufacturing, or anything in the 'true crime' world, or much in the way of electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. Still, knowing something reliable about how droughts and floods have affected rice production in China and why rice prices are rising makes me feel like I have at least some marginal grasp on what's going on in the real world.

HaZeust 4y ago
Where do you go for oil commodity news, generally?

rektide 4y ago

> What's troublesome for the public is that the culture does not instill a healthy level of individualism when it comes to interpreting information; we are encouraged to trust experts To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy. The not-trusters seem most likely to fall for your wonderfully stated second idea, which I love, > People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own, nor do they believe they have the capacity to do so. The most vocal mainstream resistance seems extremely quick to accept & deeply believe alternate portrayals, ones that happen to fit the constructed narratives they want to believe. I think the mainstream actually does a much better job of having skeptical takes, but wow, our tolerance for the dreck demagoguery trash that people adopt has worn real thin.

lenkite 4y ago
> To be fair, the have been a lot of people with a lot of claims about experts being wrong & awful & lying, and a very large number of these people seem pretty batshit crazy. Many of these "batshit crazy" folks appear to have been correct in hindsight.

pixl97 4y ago

>People don't believe they have time to understand things on their own Knowing more is better, but has particular risks... https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 It has taken me years to become expert level in just the things I do, there is vast range of knowledge I have, and yet because of the knowledge I have, I know that I barely know shit. >we are encouraged to trust experts and to otherwise follow one of two distinct camps on any given topic. This is what happens in the US because of our political system that loves turning everything in to L/R, Us/Them means of thinking.