The mental cost of Always Skeptical

Reddit is a dumpster fire. At least the r/all or whatever the front page is now, plus some major subreddits where dissent from the correct opinion is buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.

For now, it's still highly useful for very specific and obscure things, such as many of the smaller passionate subreddits filled with skilled amateurs and professionals. For example, when Googling "Oregon vacation" you get 2 pages of ads, questionable travel sites, and a laundry list of other corporate sites.

Go to reddit, search for the same thing, find a thread with a lot of comments and you'll usually get a lot of good info, including the good, bad, and the ugly. Corporate site would have you believe there are no such things as bad and ugly, except perhaps in regard to their competitors.

Google sucks, Bing sucks, DuckCensorGo sucks, and we're living in the suck era of the internet. Gone are the days of the free, un-curated, uncensored wild west internet. The inventive, talented, & entrepreneurial should all start working together to prevent the rent seekers from destroying all the nice things, as they are doing to the internet. Please stop handing over your legacy to thugs!

The above partly contributed to my becoming perpetually skeptical of every single article of news I read. I still need to work on being more skeptical of "news" that fits my worldview, as I'm sure many of us do, but it very much feels like there is a mental cost involved in not letting your brain absorb new information without critically questioning the new information. Especially if you take the time to dig deeper. Who has that kind of time--especially if you have a full-time job and a family? So most of the time I read something, I end up putting it in one of the mental categories of  "possibly true, but don't bet on it" or "possibly true, but probably missing valuable details/context." Or the increasingly popular category, "clickbaity headline, probably untrue." These are all subcategories belonging to the larger, "garbage news" category.

This has led me to increasingly avoid reading major news outlets. And since I don't really have much time to verify the credibility of new sources, I am ultimately getting less and less news.

Take this apparently horrific example, found on reddit's front page: Black man awaiting kidney transplant beaten by hospital security.

It's clickbaity even without the racial descriptor. So I am intrigued, appropriately horrified, and also skeptical because clickbait and race. I did only a little digging, and several of the other outlets are saying the same thing, most relying on this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article or this one from Newsweek.

The incident happened last year, but is in the news now because of newly released video. The video shows the kidney patient being tackled and not much else. It does not reflect well upon the hospital/security staff, however. But still, the whole context we are getting is from the kidney patient's family and a short video. This is partly because the hospital is reportedly not saying anything about it right now. 

Suspiciously, there is more video, but it is not released. Said video includes an interrogation where security allegedly says and does horrible things, but not released. Shit like this makes me trust the news like I trust Joe Biden to keep inflation low.

If everything being reported and claimed in the lawsuit is 100% factual, and there is no important missing context, then yes, obviously the hospital should pay and the security staff involved be replaced and their replacements better trained.

But the world I have become more aware of in recent years rarely provides 100% factual information, and rarely provides all the important context. If you can't clear these hurdles convincingly, you are in the "garbage news" category. 

The kidney patient story is but a drop in the ocean. It might even be mostly true, but I can't turn off the Always Skeptical switch in my brain. Even if I wanted to, I don't think it's a great idea. But it is taxing, and I find myself reading more and knowing less. I think I need to change some habits. Maybe something along the lines of less internet, more books. Devote some time to discovering a few new credible, nonpartisan, and respected-but-not-part-of-the-establishment journalists. 

Truthful media

Virtually an oxymoron these days, maybe. It certainly feels that way at least.

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Last year and in 2016, the news cycle was a constant stream of misinformation, half-truths, spin, negligent omissions, and a clusterf*ck of political hacks throwing shit wherever they could just to see what would stick. 

click for story

It's still going on to a large extent and it's only going to get worse each presidential election.

You can't trust the news today. 

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But recently I found a few tools to help me wander with a bit more confidence through our national swamp of news. I've only used them for a few hours so no guarantees. I can only give my first impressions, and they are good:

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Ground News: A website and app that shows how much a story is reported via sources on a left-right spectrum. It has a very nice blindspot feature (most of which is unfortunately behind a pay-wall) which highlights stories reported from mostly left and mostly right sources--so you can see what the other side is reading and probably outraged about that day.

From their "about" page: 

Looking to break free from your echo chamber?

We’ve already helped over 250,000 escape theirs and see the news from a different perspective. Ground News was created to be a news destination for everyone, regardless of political ideology.

I hope Ground News is as good as it appears to be. If so, I may even subscribe just for the blindspot feature. You may quibble with their left/right/center attribution to various news outlets, but at a glance, it's not too bad. Unless you think the WaPo is a rightwing rag, then I don't know how to help you.

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Influence Watch: founded in 2016 by Capital Research Center (which kind of explicitly leans right), pretty much gives the downlow on any person or group that has any significant connection to American politics. As my biases tend to lean right and I frequent a lot of right-leaning sites, I am very surprised I've never heard of this site. 

What the hell, rightwing media? This site is amazing, why aren't you linking it? 

So I thought maybe Influence Watch was too one-sided for even the rightwing, but no, it seems to be a refreshingly even-handed wiki of sorts about major political players and journalists. I've only been perusing the site for a couple hours, but I have yet to spot any red-flags or obvious lies, spin, etc.

From their "about" page:

Capital Research Center conceived of this project after identifying a need for more fact-based, accurate descriptions of all of the various influencers of public policy issues. Many so-called “watchdog” groups are instead opponents of the outlets they are watching. Armed with 30-years of research and data on advocacy organizations, foundations, and donors, CRC utilizes a universe of well-trained contributors to help build the individual and organizational profiles that will populate the website.

CRC has a perspective on the public policy process as well, but this resource is more important than that. We let the information speak for itself—information that frequently is not cited in reports about these individuals and organizations.

InfluenceWatch strives to be comprehensive, and profiles are frequently updated and written in a manner that’s accurate and measured. InfluenceWatch brings unprecedented transparency to the funding, motives, and interconnections of the entities profiled.

That's so refreshing it's almost quaint. Compare for yourself and check the pages on Charles Koch and George Soros. Or the NRA and the Brady Campaign.

I've bookmarked both sites and plan to use them frequently. After the last 4+ years of garbage news, these recent discoveries give much needed relief and hope. More of this please.  

Initial thoughts on Strzok hearing

It's not over yet, and I missed bits and pieces, but I've seen enough.

If one wants candid answers to important and pressing questions, a televised congressional hearing is one of the last places you'll find them.

Although part of it was quite entertaining, if regrettable, but only further contributes to the idea congress is a cesspool and their televised events little more than clown shows.

The only new thing I learned, was that Peter Strzok does not appear to be all that intelligent. That and his somewhat recently publicized texts, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the FBI, let alone the town in which all this is taking place.

In summary, when it came to the substantive issues discussed, all interrogative progress was expectedly stalled when Strzok and his fellow Democrats began arguing over the definition of bias, and concern trolling about conflating personal political views with bias.

Edited to add: I missed more than I thought. Ace has a more detailed post on the hearing.


In other news, I'm pretty sure I just heard Shep Smith say, very matter-of-factly, as if he were Walter fucking Cronkite, that Russia is in fact our enemy and they did tamper with our democracy.

They probably did tamper, but he said it as if Russians infiltrated every other polling station and falsified the outcomes, and we're on the verge of war with those dirty bastards. Where's my fainting couch? Get a grip, Shep.


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The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket

Before people have started using that or a similar phrase in the affirmative, the world has only gotten better. We are all richer, live longer, less hungry than before, and it's only getting better.

Yet as we always have, we still complain like things are getting worse. This pessimism bias afflicts us all (perhaps that is what keeps us improving things).

Speculate about the Flynn effect, natural selection, availability of capital, population (more hands=more work=more stuff), whatever you want: life generally gets a little better everyday.



Let's hope we continue the trend.