We live in a world whereby the acquisition of information is never more than a few mouse clicks away. If we hear about something that has happened or is happening that we are unaware of, then all you have to do is head to Google and uncover countless search results.
The problem with this availability, is that whilst you can argue that you have the potential to be more informed than at any other time in history. You are also mired in a sticky web of post truth.
Yesterday President Trump declared that he was not going to visit the UK to open the new American Embassy because the Obama administration had sanctioned its sale.
This is patently and demonstrably false, whilst the finalisation of the sale itself was indeed carried out under President Obama. The decision to sell it laid at the feet of the Bush administration. The building was deemed vulnerable to terrorist attack, and so a new purpose built building was commissioned.
So either Trump new this and decided to try and deceive people about it; or he himself is just as vulnerable to the world of post truth that we all live in.
As I pointed out in the twin to this article; An Experiment In Critical Thinking, the human mind has two different systems for analysing information.
The dominant system seems to be the heuristic one, which uses rule-of-thumb in order to make quick, informed decisions.
On Steemit, just like on many other social media and news sites, we see a picture, a headline, and a two line sample from the beginning of the article.
This is the perfect setup for rule-of-thumb thinking; a picture is a heuristic shortcut to help you know what the article is about.
Then the headline itself attempts to give you the whole story in just a few words. Lastly the sample paragraph helps you to complete the picture, and thus if you do even bother to read the article, you have already come to a conclusion about its contents.
Whilst musing on this subject from time to time, I have wondered if there's an easy solution. Because the obvious solution is to fact check every piece of information that comes your way.
However this is not only extremely taxing on the mind, it is prohibitively time consuming. In an age where we are bombarded by terabytes of information every day, it simply isn't practical to expect someone to be truly critical over every piece of news that they come across.
I personally took the decision to cut news out of my life around four years ago now. My main reasons were that 99% of the news I was reading and watching was depressing, and that in turn, was making me depressed.
Secondly, whilst it may be important on an objective level, 99% of news is not important to me, therefore I should free up my mind to concentrate on the things that are.
A by-product of doing this, is because you are getting less news, it is much easier to apply critical thinking to the stories that you do decide to investigate.
So that's it, kill those newsfeed notifications to your phone and desktop. Take the Facebook and any similar apps you have off your phone, stop watching the News At Ten, or buying newspapers.
You will be happier, and you will be better equipped to make sense of this crazy world.
Off course my advice doesn't stretch to Mr Trump, keeping up to date with the news is probably a good idea if you're POTUS.
To him I would simply say; check your facts before you Tweet them.
To the rest of you, ignore 99% of the things that come your way so that you can properly assess the 1% of things you don't ignore.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? ARE WE LIVING IN A POST TRUTH WORLD AND DOES MY SOLUTION GO SOME WAY TO SOLVING THAT? DO YOU HAVE A BETTER IDEA; OR ARE WE ALL JUST DOOMED? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
