[andlarry]

> I now designate daily subway rides for reading New York Times breaking news emails so that clients don’t find me in an anxiety-ridden state when they arrive for tutoring sessions.

"Intellectuals [are] virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons:

1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information;

2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information;

3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves'.

They literally need propaganda."

Konrad Kellen in the introduction of Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul

[kodah]

I think there's a lot of social pressure also contributed by other intellectuals to "stay informed", and pressure within political parties to make sure that people are also reading the news with the right interpretations. Just to say, I think the anxiety-ridden mess mentioned previously has some reinforcement behind it.

[dfxm12]

Be wary of someone telling you to "do your own research" in the face of expert consensus. They are well aware of the issues you will run into. This page outlines a few things: https://thinkingispower.com/the-problem-with-doing-your-own-...

[somenameforme]

"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"

George Orwell, 1984

If one grants primacy over their own mental faculties - believing that anybody else's word has more relevance than their very interpretation of the world - then that other group now has the power to make one believe, and ultimately do, anything. At scale, that is a recipe for horrible things.

A society with a freedom of thought will never have a utopia because we just can't stop finding falsehoods appealing. But you will also never have a dystopia because society will always trend towards the truth as the past of least resistance, even if the road there might be quite bumpy. But in the grand scheme of things this is the state mankind has been in that sent us from being glorified apes to to being glorified apes with vast cities, neat toys, and being on the verge of setting out in exploration and settlement of the stars.

[qiskit]

Easier to train a smart dog than a dumb one.