Ex Nihilo

One of the things I wished I learned earlier in my life was focused skepticism – the ability to question the veracity of all information encountered in order to filter for objective truth. This process is not perfect and is often onerous, it involves thinking clearly about your own biases, and doing a couple of game theory rounds on the biases likely to be in the information you’re absorbing. It requires relentless logic and correlating information encountered with other data sets that are not currently present in front of you. It involves the active discarding of statements that are essentially illogical leaps or based on thinly sourced generalizations. The latest I encountered (completely out of context) was, “Many historians credit this tariff with igniting a global trade war that contributed to the Great Depression.” The focused skeptic thinks to himself: “many historians” could really be one or two historians taken out of context. Without any specific quotes or backup research, this kind of statement is almost worthless as a key piece of a facts based report. The focused skeptic unconsciously amasses a diary of ‘weasel qualifiers’ that tip him off to leaps of opinion that are probably not based on facts (this is why I enjoy the bogus trend series by Jack Shafer on Slate). The focused skeptic relies on one true insight: all information is authored by human beings and they are imperfect vessels of truth that must be verified regardless of how well the information is presented.

Focused skepticism helps you arrive at a good sense of what is likely true based on the information you encounter. When made into a habit, it’s sort of like an instant purifying process for absorbed information – everything gets a probability of correctness assigned to it as it goes into the brain – which, it is hoped, will lead to a less cluttered and purer set of knowledge to build an informed response to the world on; the very essence of living and being conscious.

Prior to my discovery of focused skepticism, I generally believed what I read; if the information was presented in a credible enough manner. Books got high marks. Well branded magazines did as well; the likes of Newsweek, The Economist, etc. I mean who takes the tremendous time and resources to create one of those (a book or a magazine) and then deliberately provides information that is less than distilled truth?@#!? Well sadly, it turns out that there is a lot of people who would; people with an agenda and axes to grind. People bent of influence to a particular opinion, or people who are just ignorant. There’s also the inconvenient fact that information delivery is a business model – there is a lot of money in gussying up opinion as truth and selling it in pretty binders. There is a reason it’s called the ‘information marketplace’; just turns out that there is a lot of junk on tap. In most markets however, there are signals of quality that are easily well understood. In the information marketplace, the obvious markers are usually wrong. One has to taste the produce. Personally I have undertaken training my brain to discard the blinders put on by a ‘brand name’ information source and to dig into its cadence to understand what is important in its premise and what is not.

This means that when I am reading, I still mentally remind myself to flip the switch – old habits dies hard. Until today!

Color me tickled when I started reading a feed from Wired dot com on my phone. After a moment of instant self-introspection, I realized that I actually started from a point of skepticism immediately while I was reading it. I know this because I have a subscription to Wired and each time I read the actual magazine (nice covers!), I have to ‘flip the switch’ – the nice shiny art deco cover distracts me. However as a feed, I didn’t have to flip the switch, it was flipped for me unconsciously BECAUSE of the source; the WEB. Once the nice cover, pretty pictures and professional layout was stripped and it was a bunch of text on my phone, I approached the information as everyone should; skeptically. This leads me to believe that as information becomes more syndicated through the internet; as feeds, via Facebook, through twitter; it becomes less authoritative to the human brain (this needs further research* to confirm, it’s a thought right now). I believe we perceive information from the web as inherently less trustworthy and thus more open to scrutiny and debate. The trope of how untrustworthy information found on the internet is pretty well established**.

If this is proved true, this has vast social implications for the emergence of RSS feeds, information driven blogs and the new digital distribution of books and other information media. The nature of these things is that in this brave new world, information is separated from their traditional markers of credibility (a dust jacket, a well-crafted forward, a well-designed cover page, etc.) and presented in their purest essence; a bunch of words written by a thinking human being; who, but for expertise (you hope), is just like you. If the consciousness of the masses is set to question more and more of published knowledge and its veracity, a sea change might be upon us as an evolving species.

Hopefully I can do follow on research to broaden these insights, but I think I’m on to something here.

* I’m thinking a straightforward experiment where people selected from the same background are given the exact same information as a web feed and as a magazine glossy article and asked to rate their confidence in its veracity would be an exciting start to this research.

** It’s possible that human beings have a predilection to trust stuff that is spoken or read. In an uncritical way. If this is the case, the tendency to mistrust feed/web based information may disappear over time when it becomes the dominant way of distributing information to the exclusion of all else.