| your criticism could hardly be worse directed the article does recommend finding better sources of information > to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. ... > Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed. the article also links to harper's weekly review he also regularly posted reviews on his blog of the books he found to be good sources of information (as well as some he didn't); in 02006 he read 120 books http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2006 and in 02007 he read 70 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2007. many of his other blog posts were about one or another such book a couple years later i worked with aaron on watchdog.net, an effort to collate and make easily available politically relevant information on politicians; we got a lot of information online and well organized, but voters didn't really care, and other people were doing a better job of providing that information aaron was easily in the top 0.1% of the world population when it came to helping people find better sources of information |