22 Comments
Jun 17, 2021Liked by zeynep

so well said! and so aware of our current reality when it comes to news coverage and consumption. thank you for the reminder of how important it is to calm down and slow down as we try to navigate all the many, many “facts”

being presented to us these days. thank you!

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I’ve spent the last week only consuming long-form news content, and (shocker) I now have a lot more bandwidth to take care of myself and those around me. Long-form news should really be the only news we touch, thanks for the post Zeynep!

Side note: I think I’m actually more well informed on the things that matter, too

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I love how you zero in on cognitive and motivational factors (biases or otherwise) in the distortion of narrative or problematic interpretation. And of course those same blind spots have bearing on our very efforts to reconstruct what we missed or what went wrong after the fact: our narrative about the missed narratives. I would suggest that in addition to what you noted about initial impressions being "sticky," there is an interaction between this and the very fact of that early information being anecdotal, which may paradoxically make it seem more credible because it's ahead of the curve.

The other thing all your analysis makes me think about is how much extra *work* good critical thinking can take. It's not just about skill in the sense of avoiding fallacies and pitfalls or knowing how to interpret data, but doing the legwork of seeking out all the relevant evidence and really scrutinizing what is and isn't there. This is something a majority of people probably don't feel up to doing, or at least don't think is required, and it also requires a certain amount of resources. So, along with stickiness of initial impressions (and media reinforcing this), there is a gap between the level of effort required to unstick things, and prevailing norms for how much effort to invest.

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Slow news is 'good' news.

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Great piece and another deeply frustrating piece of stickiness is the way in which public health advice and guidance here in the UK continues to promote the idea of spreading Covid through touch. The latest guidance on weddings as well as the existing guidance on prayer services has the following - "Books, reusable and communal resources such as service sheets, prayer mats, or devotional material should be removed from use. Single use alternatives can be provided as long as they are removed by the attendee. Items owned by individuals for use in the ceremony or registration (such as a prayer mat or religious text, or a pen for signing paperwork) may be brought in but should be removed after the marriage or civil partnership." Catching Covid through a pen???!!! Sigh.

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It is interesting how much good information has come from China. You have done a good job, throughout these articles, articulating what the information is and how much weight we should give it. Unfortunately, our own biases have presented American government and media from appreciating how much data has actually been there for our edification. How does all of this correlate with recent news of COVID cases in the USA earlier than believed?

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Interesting to think that the median (maybe modal) American is probably already skipping the day to day news cycle, yet how little that helps, as these stickiness and feedback loop issues define the longer term narratives absorbed into the CW.

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I use an app call Curio (https://curio.io) where journalists read news stories. It used to be just big idea longform things like Aeon, but now they also do The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, lots of other outlets, and still long think-y pieces from Aeon and The Point and so on. Trying to limit myself to my local paper (where I only read the local news, not national or world) and being picky about what I listen to on Curio definitely helps. Unless I get sucked into stalking around on Twitter, relating to news in this way means I generally miss most daily blood pressure jumps that in the end aren't important. Like Mark posted below, consuming mostly longform pieces really helps me slow down judgment and assumptions, and think more deeply.

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The one thing I like about the "jitter" in the NYTimes election needle is that it helped emphasize that there is uncertainty in the number here (which, apparently, being a probability is not enough!) I have a weather app on my phone (Dark Sky) that, among other things, aims to predict the amount of rain at my specific location (not just at the city weather station) over the next 60 minutes, and it has a jittery, sloshy graph like that to help emphasize the uncertainty. (I think it just works by using the radar map and seeing whether big pockets of rain are moving towards or away from my gps location.)

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