[mistermann]

Another approach is trying to take a disciplined, abstract view of the situation.

For the news, pay less attention to the content of the news, but the style in which it is delivered, paying particular attention to word choice, chosen perspective, suspiciously excluded details, double standards, epistemic soundness (how would one actually know the "fact" that is being reported), etc.

For internet conversations, try to remain undecided on the particular issue being argued, but closely observe the nature of the conversation, using the same techniques as above.

I think if you can manage to do this skillfully, what would normally be an exercise in frustration and stress can transform into a pleasurable study of the nature of human beings, if you're into that sort of thing.

[smolder]

I'm with you, though it's hard to talk about what you observe from this point of view with people who are neck deep in a given narrative. It's isolating at the same time as enlightening.

[mistermann]

Completely agree. On one hand, this seems like little more than plain old common sense, little more than observing the peculiarities of human psychological quirks in action. But then on the other hand, I can't escape this feeling that's there's something actually quite interesting going on here...more specifically, that relatively more intelligent people tend to be aware of these psychological phenomena, and are able to discuss them when the topic is the phenomena themselves, but when a topic is something else, this ability/knowledge "seems" [0] to ~vanish. And it seems it's not only that a strong psychological resistance to the phenomena arises, but that perhaps something occurs in the mind that makes prior knowledge ~literally inaccessible.

It seems fairly unlikely that this is a novel idea, but I've yet to come across any literature that discusses it directly. I imagine part of the problem is that studying such a thing would be incredibly difficult.

[0] I say "seems" because I am running purely on heuristics derived from aggregate patterns of aggregate behavior, comments, and voting - to be more certain, one would require the ability to somehow monitor individuals to see if this theory can actually be observed at the individual level.