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”
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
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.
Thank you! Yeah, I do spend a lot of time on that question. So much about it is an uphill battle to how we operate, both at the brain and group and society/institution level. This is a key issue I have with the "let information be democratized" discourse. On the one hand, OF COURSE. Paternalism and "we know what's good for you" is not acceptable, and backfires. On the other hand, it is very very hard to do this right, and not be misled without spending a lot of time and having a lot of relevant expertise. I think this has been the story of last year.
Thanks, this is really cool. But it further demonstrates the "turtles" problem: I can't think of a single person who has ever mentioned the Empirical Studies Conflict Project or is likely to have heard if it (including myself). There are just too many choices and too many competing means for distinguishing and narrowing down these choices.
In this sense there may be something of a tradeoff between seeking the highest quality sources, and still being aware enough of what other people are relying on that you can engage with them with this context in mind. Otherwise it's just your news, my news which is still better than wrong news but can leave you isolated in your well-informedness. So maybe there's a balance between truth, and basic fluency in circulating half-truths and 3/4 truths?
I really don't know. I've been trusting BoAS as a source, but haven't looked into this list, and still try to keep an open mind when I read their articles because I only started reading them a few months ago. The core problem of how you build a shared sense of reality is probably one of the great unarticulated missions of our time. My starting point is actually physical reality, the world around us -- like, what would I know to be true about the world if I got my news from the soil or a tree in my yard every day. Kind of a woo-woo way to approach it but I feel like reading "news" is just running around in a poorly designed maze where walls and dead-ends are everywhere. What is true? This tree is here. I can smell it. The stars are there, or at least bright points of light in the sky. The magpies are busy. Last night's rain smells good. (Whether we're living in a simulation or a hologram on the outside of a black hold isn't a question I try to engage in on that level, though it's fun to think about.)
Is it helpful? I don't know. I think that the more people who do something like that, and interact with one another in real life on things that aren't "politics," might at least improve life and reduce suffering. That's slightly my bias because I research and write about walking and walkability and really believe it has the power to change our lives for the better, though it's not a cure-all. It feels like a decent place to start anyway, reducing suffering.
That's a fascinating take, and delightfully counterintuitive. You're right: at a certain point our desperate efforts to keep up with everything going on in the world, to always have to have an opinion and a debate about it, to have to always be *solving* things, becomes like a hall of mirrors or as you said, a poorly designed maze (great metaphor). I don't think the problem is even talking about politics per se so much as "politics"; i.e. the imperative to make everything Very Important. There is definitely a problem of scale and feeling increasingly remote from the things we engage about increasingly urgently. And I think part of that problem of scale is one of time scale: from day to day and hour to hour the reality of our local world, and its dynamics of change, look very different from the refracted reality and hyper-acceleration of change that is constantly being refreshed and respun in the "official" world of news and online.
The irony is that I return to this blog periodically not to slow down but to engage more, perhaps because it's a small and open enough community and the overarching mission is such that instead it's an opportunity to step outside the maze a little.
I like the idea of walking/walkability as a lens! I see you have some pieces on that, will have to check them out.
Oh, totally, "politics" rather than politics and everything being Very Important. I really like what you're saying about scale. We're each only one human, after all, and our attention is demanded by so many things. I also turn to this newsletter to engage more, though I do feel it slows down my thinking (in a good way) because I can read what people say and think about it and comment much later or never but don't ever feel the need to have a hot take (thank. goodness!).
Part of my interest in walking is the aspect of social capital -- how connected neighborhoods where people see one another in person can become resilient and supportive. Just in this exchange here, I was thinking about something I'd written about the role of religion and religious buildings in relationship and community throughout human history, and it made me wonder if most humans have never relied on facts or knowledge at all, not really, and instead relied on the trust built through tribes and/or shared faith. As an atheist, I'm all for building trust and bonds in other ways, and neighborhoods are one of the few I can think of that might have that capacity.
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.
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?
Those early science preprints were wonderful. Current, information-backed, and extremely well-written. If I was still looking for technical writing models to share with students I would have selected several of these.
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.
I sort of agree; it's not enough just to slow down the time frame though that's certainly related to the problem. For one thing, once you dip back in you're still dealing with the same level of quality vetted with the same inconsistent standards. Not to mention news that assumes you've been keeping up with their pace, so now you have too little context, not too much.
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.
Yeah, though this goes back to the same issue: which ones? The curation problem is turtles all the way down. Of course we manage it, somehow, but the challenge is real.
Well yes. I don't think there's an absolute answer to this (as you say, turtles all the way down). We just have to slow down and start building a catalogue of sources we feel we can trust. After giving up Twitter in ... 2018? 2019 maybe? I subscribed to your newsletter (pre-Substack, just the occasional email) and Ed Yong's and decided I'd start with trusting things you both recommend, and Aeon because I love reading it, and have written for them and know how rigorous their process is.
Trust is a long, slow thing. I don't think there are reliable shortcuts.
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.)
Yeah communicating uncertainty is tough. I had a major objection to 2016 forecasts which said stuff like "Clinton has 74.6% of getting elected"... That extra digit, the faux precision. The opposite of what we need to communicate about forecasts.
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!
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
I find this re consuming mostly longform, too.
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.
Thank you! Yeah, I do spend a lot of time on that question. So much about it is an uphill battle to how we operate, both at the brain and group and society/institution level. This is a key issue I have with the "let information be democratized" discourse. On the one hand, OF COURSE. Paternalism and "we know what's good for you" is not acceptable, and backfires. On the other hand, it is very very hard to do this right, and not be misled without spending a lot of time and having a lot of relevant expertise. I think this has been the story of last year.
In case anyone is interested, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has some fact-checking orgs they vouch for at the end of this article on worldwide Covid misinformation: https://thebulletin.org/2021/06/weve-analyzed-thousands-of-covid-19-misinformation-narratives-here-are-six-regional-takeaways/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter06172021&utm_content=DisruptiveTechnologies_COVIDMisinformationNarratives_06172021
Thanks, this is really cool. But it further demonstrates the "turtles" problem: I can't think of a single person who has ever mentioned the Empirical Studies Conflict Project or is likely to have heard if it (including myself). There are just too many choices and too many competing means for distinguishing and narrowing down these choices.
In this sense there may be something of a tradeoff between seeking the highest quality sources, and still being aware enough of what other people are relying on that you can engage with them with this context in mind. Otherwise it's just your news, my news which is still better than wrong news but can leave you isolated in your well-informedness. So maybe there's a balance between truth, and basic fluency in circulating half-truths and 3/4 truths?
This is why I have beer?
I really don't know. I've been trusting BoAS as a source, but haven't looked into this list, and still try to keep an open mind when I read their articles because I only started reading them a few months ago. The core problem of how you build a shared sense of reality is probably one of the great unarticulated missions of our time. My starting point is actually physical reality, the world around us -- like, what would I know to be true about the world if I got my news from the soil or a tree in my yard every day. Kind of a woo-woo way to approach it but I feel like reading "news" is just running around in a poorly designed maze where walls and dead-ends are everywhere. What is true? This tree is here. I can smell it. The stars are there, or at least bright points of light in the sky. The magpies are busy. Last night's rain smells good. (Whether we're living in a simulation or a hologram on the outside of a black hold isn't a question I try to engage in on that level, though it's fun to think about.)
Is it helpful? I don't know. I think that the more people who do something like that, and interact with one another in real life on things that aren't "politics," might at least improve life and reduce suffering. That's slightly my bias because I research and write about walking and walkability and really believe it has the power to change our lives for the better, though it's not a cure-all. It feels like a decent place to start anyway, reducing suffering.
That's a fascinating take, and delightfully counterintuitive. You're right: at a certain point our desperate efforts to keep up with everything going on in the world, to always have to have an opinion and a debate about it, to have to always be *solving* things, becomes like a hall of mirrors or as you said, a poorly designed maze (great metaphor). I don't think the problem is even talking about politics per se so much as "politics"; i.e. the imperative to make everything Very Important. There is definitely a problem of scale and feeling increasingly remote from the things we engage about increasingly urgently. And I think part of that problem of scale is one of time scale: from day to day and hour to hour the reality of our local world, and its dynamics of change, look very different from the refracted reality and hyper-acceleration of change that is constantly being refreshed and respun in the "official" world of news and online.
The irony is that I return to this blog periodically not to slow down but to engage more, perhaps because it's a small and open enough community and the overarching mission is such that instead it's an opportunity to step outside the maze a little.
I like the idea of walking/walkability as a lens! I see you have some pieces on that, will have to check them out.
Oh, totally, "politics" rather than politics and everything being Very Important. I really like what you're saying about scale. We're each only one human, after all, and our attention is demanded by so many things. I also turn to this newsletter to engage more, though I do feel it slows down my thinking (in a good way) because I can read what people say and think about it and comment much later or never but don't ever feel the need to have a hot take (thank. goodness!).
Part of my interest in walking is the aspect of social capital -- how connected neighborhoods where people see one another in person can become resilient and supportive. Just in this exchange here, I was thinking about something I'd written about the role of religion and religious buildings in relationship and community throughout human history, and it made me wonder if most humans have never relied on facts or knowledge at all, not really, and instead relied on the trust built through tribes and/or shared faith. As an atheist, I'm all for building trust and bonds in other ways, and neighborhoods are one of the few I can think of that might have that capacity.
Slow news is 'good' news.
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.
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?
Those early science preprints were wonderful. Current, information-backed, and extremely well-written. If I was still looking for technical writing models to share with students I would have selected several of these.
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.
I sort of agree; it's not enough just to slow down the time frame though that's certainly related to the problem. For one thing, once you dip back in you're still dealing with the same level of quality vetted with the same inconsistent standards. Not to mention news that assumes you've been keeping up with their pace, so now you have too little context, not too much.
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.
Yeah, though this goes back to the same issue: which ones? The curation problem is turtles all the way down. Of course we manage it, somehow, but the challenge is real.
Well yes. I don't think there's an absolute answer to this (as you say, turtles all the way down). We just have to slow down and start building a catalogue of sources we feel we can trust. After giving up Twitter in ... 2018? 2019 maybe? I subscribed to your newsletter (pre-Substack, just the occasional email) and Ed Yong's and decided I'd start with trusting things you both recommend, and Aeon because I love reading it, and have written for them and know how rigorous their process is.
Trust is a long, slow thing. I don't think there are reliable shortcuts.
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.)
Yeah communicating uncertainty is tough. I had a major objection to 2016 forecasts which said stuff like "Clinton has 74.6% of getting elected"... That extra digit, the faux precision. The opposite of what we need to communicate about forecasts.
Dark Sky sounds fun!