I followed a link to an article about how Facebook was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar. I got a few paragraphs into it and then thought, “Wait, the New York Times is telling me a scandalous but murky story about Big Tech and world events...and I’m just condensing that as ‘known facts of public record.’ Isn’t this Gell-Mann amnesia?”
So then I felt myself searching for reasons why the NYT could be trusted more about this kind of thing, but found it difficult to come up with a single specific reason that I actually believed. So then I supposed that it was worth reading anyway, since the basic facts were important, and I wasn’t at that much risk from whatever biased framing the NYT might take. But I realized that I didn’t really believe that either—I imagined the future in which I turn out to have been utterly misled by the article, and that hypothetical future felt entirely plausible.
So I didn’t read it.
It was an effortful and unrewarding decision, but I endorse it, and I’m hopeful that it will be easier next time. For news stories of this sort, I expect to fall short of my own epistemic standards unless I check 3 or 4 diverse sources. But I didn’t want to do an hour of responsible research, I wanted to spend a leisurely 10 minutes on a single, highly consumable, authoritatively-voiced article and then enjoy the feeling of being informed.
Sometimes https://ground.news/ helps with us politics.
For international news I have at times delved into the GDELT data set but that’s lot of work.
I followed a link to an article about how Facebook was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar. I got a few paragraphs into it and then thought, “Wait, the New York Times is telling me a scandalous but murky story about Big Tech and world events...and I’m just condensing that as ‘known facts of public record.’ Isn’t this Gell-Mann amnesia?”
So then I felt myself searching for reasons why the NYT could be trusted more about this kind of thing, but found it difficult to come up with a single specific reason that I actually believed. So then I supposed that it was worth reading anyway, since the basic facts were important, and I wasn’t at that much risk from whatever biased framing the NYT might take. But I realized that I didn’t really believe that either—I imagined the future in which I turn out to have been utterly misled by the article, and that hypothetical future felt entirely plausible.
So I didn’t read it.
It was an effortful and unrewarding decision, but I endorse it, and I’m hopeful that it will be easier next time. For news stories of this sort, I expect to fall short of my own epistemic standards unless I check 3 or 4 diverse sources. But I didn’t want to do an hour of responsible research, I wanted to spend a leisurely 10 minutes on a single, highly consumable, authoritatively-voiced article and then enjoy the feeling of being informed.
Sometimes https://ground.news/ helps with us politics. For international news I have at times delved into the GDELT data set but that’s lot of work.