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How do you motters think about the information you choose to take in from the world, especially through the Internet. I don't really like what my use of the Internet has turned into. As a kid, I used to read a lot of encyclopedias before I had access to the Internet. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever, all of humanity's knowledge, all these different perspectives, available for free. Wow! No more asking my parents to buy another encyclopedia, I can just read anything. The kids who had Internet must be so much smarter than me.
Then, I actually got the Internet. Yeah, porn and video games. A lot of wikipedia, and bash.org, and 4chan, everything2, and some forums too, though, but yeah, I quickly learned why it wasn't the utopia I imagined. Eventually, invisibly so, most of those sources got supplanted by reddit. It seems very hard to escape reddit nowadays because like many others, I was unconsciously trained by the changing realities of search engines to append site:reddit.com to almost all of my search queries. It goes without saying that reddit is an NPC infested shithole, but it's come to a point where I'm just deeply skeptical of what valuable information can be found on the Internet. Everything just feels like clickbait. My experience of using the internet summarized is that if you're watching a documentary instead of reading some boring in-depth report, if you're reading science communications instead of the actual paper, if you're even reading the news instead of whatever primary sources may be available to you, you're getting deceived, you're getting fed an oversimplified narrative, you're filling your memory banks with garbage information that may be useless at best or may even lay the seeds for you to make further incorrect conclusions at worst.
The Internet seems to exist as a compromise between learning nothing at all and taking the time to actually form a complex opinion about something. If you're tired of endlessly mulling over values-based argument (like abortion for example) that obviously have no discursive solution, if you're tired of reading various content where the punchline is capitalism bad (not to say that it isn't, but your feelings won't change the world), if you're tired of reading how a congressman supports [horrible thing] because he voted against a bill titled "[horrible thing] eradication act" but actually filled with dozens of other unrelated provisions, then what do you read? Communities like this are one potential solution, mostly because the audience is more intelligent, but so much of this online discourse is just criticism (in the broad sense of the word) of the normie discourse, and that has the same energy as actual scientists wasting their time on in-depth debunkings of flat earthers.
I've been eating this bad information diet for so long, I don't even know what's good on the Internet anymore. What I can read and feel like I learned about something that's really going on in the world, not just something to convert me to an ideology, not something to get my outraged, not something oversimplified, not something America-centric (once again, broad sense of the word here, reading about, say, hijab protests is pretty much American news).
Best I've come up with is, I guess, blogs like ACX, gwern, cosma shalizi, that type of stuff. It's a complete reversal of what they teach in school, right? Personal blogs--opinion--the lowest tier of source credibility, but, shit, at least they talk about things I haven't heard of before, at least they anticipate skepticism and ask and answer some of the questions I would have asked. I'm also considering just completely reimagining how I use the Internet, ideas include:
Don't use it for the content, use it as a social network prioritizing those who can link the most interesting offline resources: books, organizations, products, and then consume that instead.
Read only financial news, reasoning that if nobody's making money off it, it's not worth knowing about.
Forgo news altogether as a starting point, read only about the future. Prediction markets, superforecasters, McKinsey reports, that type of thing. Reasoning that the most useful, actionable information known now is indirectly incorporated in competent (remains to be seen) individuals trying to predict the future.
Cut my losses, settle for a very plain information diet of "just the facts" type news that I (somehow) curate to not have any culture war bullshit or lurid news and seek the stimulating content else(where?)
If you do decide to walk the "just the facts" road, I strongly recommend the Wikipedia Current Events portal.
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It's not that hard to find good content on the internet. Avoid most of social media, porn, clickbait websites, most news sites, etc.
Could you give a few examples of what you consider to be good content?
that is subjective, but Less Wrong, stuff shared on Hacker News (even though it is somewhat left-wing biased at times), substack blogs
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Documentaries and news seem too generic to use a term like "the internet," would media or educational media specifically would be a better clarifier?
Also I don't think this matters too much in most cases. Realistically there is far too much information in the world for any human to understand even a tiny fraction of it in full. We prioritize learning deeply on things that are interested to us, generally useful, or if we for some reason have a compulsion to get to the bottom of things. The vast majority of people truly just don't need to worry about getting more than the oversimplified narrative. Sure it may not be the Truth, but it usually is close enough to reality (especially social reality) to work for them.
It really sounds like you have strong opinions and at least somewhat good instincts for what's good based on this post.
Sounds like this is just a rant of things you don't like, or potentially issues where you aren't appreciating the rhetorical strategy. The people writing those generally are waging the Culture War, what we come here to talk about. They want to win at all costs. They are simply people rationally following their goals, trying to convince as many folks over to their side so that they win. I'm not defending the practice, but this idea of conflict theory (media etc) and mistake theory (rationalists, good scientists, etc) is useful to understand and intellectualize the mainstream discourse if it gets to be too much.
One, the Motte was explicitly formed as a sub-culture to discuss the Culture War. If you like the discourse here but are sick of the CW, go check out the rest of the rat-sphere! Looks like you have a good idea of it already. You could also try reading dense literature, textbooks, philosophical works, or high-quality magazines. Sure it might be a bit difficult/more expensive, but you can't expect to get infinite high-quality reading material for free. (yet)
This is a great idea, and in my opinion what a lot of smart folks do.
Eh, depends on your preference and stage in life. I like to keep up with big financial moves, but consuming too much finance content can make you overvalue money, and overvalue things like relationships or time. In my experience most people in intellectual or higher class realms value their time and enjoyment of life much too low, or have a faulty idea of how good life can be with the right conditions.
Very drastically depends on your goals. A lot of people like to keep up with the news for small talk. I can't imagine doing this, but some people I know have admitted to me privately that they keep up with sports just for the social benefits, even though they couldn't care less otherwise.
I'm here because, I'd imagine like many Mottizens, I find the Culture War interesting and important. I think keeping up with it and writing about it is great fun, as well as a good way to train my rhetorical skills. If you have an unhealthy relationship with it, take a step back. You don't have to go all or nothing.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Did you mean specific instead of generic?
Well, think of it this way. Say, hypothetically, the U.S. is actually an evil empire that's siphoning wealth from the global south and when I see something on the news like, say, a genocide in China, it's actually a projection of U.S. soft power to signal that they have enough of their citizens convinced that they can afford broad latitude to be aggressive under the auspices of this righteous consensus. Then I feel like an idiot engaging with something like that at face value, feeling bad about the alleged victims, or making conclusions about how dangerous life in China must be. But then I'd also conclude that well, I do live in the evil empire, and it's not really so much evil as much as it is rich and powerful and wanting to remain so, thus I wouldn't care to take the counter-narrative side of that either. After all that is done, the only winning move is to not play. So, indeed, it is a rant of things I dislike, in the same exasperated vein as, perhaps, of someone with Renaissance values in Medieval times lamenting how little interest there was to discuss ideas outside of religious ones.
Oh, I know. That said, it's fairly active and less explicitly focused on discussing things from a rat perspective than the rest, so it tends to have more of that "smart people sharing ideas" energy that I'm looking for.
Yeah, from one perspective, but from another perspective, it's admitting that internet-native content is of minimal value. I was maybe hoping that's not entirely true and I just haven't been looking in the right places and there is some kind of internet discourse that is both interesting and not political or oversimplified (or at least, simplified to a level I find acceptable so I can find the same satisfaction from it that the normie gets from the drivel he never thinks to question).
Hmm, that's interesting. So, if you lost interest in CW, are you saying you'd unplug without FOMO? I sometimes wonder if media consumption is just an addiction. If we liken information to physical goods, news seems like a terrible deal. Any individual news article loses relevance fairly quickly, even those that logically seem relevant for a long time lose their utility as people simply stop responding to news once they're out of the media cycle, it has limited value in "linking up" with future news to form a larger point. Just as a class of knowledge, it seems like such a terrible waste of time, and even knowing that generations have lived without this contrivance it still holds such a grip on me because everyone else is doing it too.
I definitely wouldn't encourage in engaging with things at face value if you care about the actual truth of the matter. As for the whole Renaissance values in Medieval times... I think you are being a tad overdramatic here. Sure the general discourse is more low-brow than I would like, but this is an unprecedented time in history for high level, intellectual discourse to flourish. We have an embarrassment of riches, you can spend your whole life engaging with brilliant people sharing fascinating ideas. Just because it takes more effort to have those conversations doesn't mean the discourse doesn't exist - this comparison seems extremely suspect to me.
Media consumption is absolutely an addiction for many people. I have disengaged from the CW in the past many times. It's not always easy, and the Motte perhaps harder to disengage from than most, but it can be done. Best way in my experience is actively filling your time with other diversions. Staying busy for lack of a better phrase.
If you feel this way, don't bother watching the news. If you genuinely care about connecting with others over topics in the cultural milieu, maybe subscribe to a high quality email newsletter or get your news from here. You write as if you have no agency with regard to the news, and that's not true! You can and absolutely should step back, evaluate your relationship with news media, and change it to suit your wants and needs.
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And because there are electronic libraries nowadays, you can even look at those interesting offline resources…online!
(I really do think that I probably read a lot more than I would without the internet, simply because it’s so much easier to find even niche books; and whenever I can access a university subscription or something, keeping up with journals as well.)
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