What if… we followed every piece of important information to its source?
So let's break down the two main words in this statement. The first is important information: this would really be what adds to or detracts from our core beliefs.
?Core beliefs note: most people and many companies have what they consider to be a set of core beliefs. These are usually some statements that have been memorized, or have been said so much over time that they've sort of become ingrained. However, most psychologist, sociologists, and other relevant ‘ologist’ will pretty much tell you that a big part of our core beliefs actually reside in the subconscious. So what we normally say is just the explicit part, and a good part of our true core beliefs resides in a deep part of our tacit or buried knowledge. For more information check out buried knowledge.
Where I want to spend most of the time is this idea of talking about the source.
No, this is not some veiled reference to the Matrix trilogy. It is more of a research focus and looking at how to categorize the types of content that we are letting infiltrate our minds. Even that making that last statement is not accurate as it means we are aware. When I say that we are ‘letting infiltrate’ means we are we have control of what is entering our literal headspace, which is not true.
I'm not gonna spend too much time talking about Internet algorithms, or information delivery methods but how we categorize the multitude of diverse, or the fire hose of information that we are getting.
Seemingly then on a two dimensional spectrum we can possibly break the type of information that we are flooded with on a daily basis in the three main categories.
??The first is what I will call unsubstantiated opinion.
Over the last few years there has been a multitude of examples of this on TV, YouTube, and other social media channels. We've seen all kinds of what has been dubbed ‘fake news’ about the 2020 US election, about Covid, about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and about a million other issues.
领英推荐
The second, and what I deem the most dangerous, is the half-truth. ?
This is where somebody makes a statement that has an element of truth to it, but they only usually relay the small element of truth and hide a much larger element either of truth (that?might annoy the listening audience) or goes against the grain of the initial fact. You see this all the time with politicians and corporate greed. Where there will be a large report and someone will take one tiny line completely out of context in order to try and prove their point. Why I deem the half-truth the most dangerous is because of that one tiny seed of truth that is in the statement lends some credibility to the speaker, regardless of how much crap and opinion they're going to add to that one little speck of truth.?
?The third, and what should be paramount in 2022 and beyond is?verified or observable facts.
I'm writing this in the midst of month six of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and it's fascinating to see the US news ‘wonder’ how the Russian people -?those who buy into Putin's narrative - can not see that their country is invading their neighbor because they're being fed lies on Russian TV, (as is evidenced by that amazing YouTube short and meme of the TV producer holding the they're lying to you poster during Russian live news feed).
What makes this particularly audacious is?that Fox News has been doing exactly the same thing in western countries. Fox News has propagated all of the Trump bullshit and right-wing agenda for decades. It only became incredibly obvious once Trump came on the scene. But what this really shows is that people can notice when someone else is being duped, but they usually can't notice when they're being duped themselves. And the saddest cases of these are all of these anti-VAX anti-mask people who caught Covid and then died from it and on their deathbed videos saying how stupid they were how they listened to the idiots who know nothing about medicine and only have their own agenda. Now they are about to die because they listen to these buffoons - yet these buffoons are still on air and are still listened to.
The challenge here is that information comes to us in all of these categories, quite often simultaneously, and even from the same network or portal. So now we come back to the source. In my very early college days in the early 80s I had a very anal retentive professor who I've come to really appreciate over the years, who basically continually admonished us to go to the source. If you see a quote, don't just accept it as how someone is using it, go to the source and find out the context. This is why I started my Quotes in Context blog.