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I think this hints to a more serious problem: we are a species designed to live in hierarchical high-trust communities, and instead we live atomized under untrustworthy authorities motivated by capital gain.
Humans are designed to black box their cognition but this only works if you can sufficiently trust the inputs and outputs. Many people do not legitimately trust the “grey boxes” today. Worse yet, those who do are continually duped. Something as simple as buying healthy food is fraught with needless issues: what counts as truly organic or grass fed or wild caught, whether organic is actually important, what counts as actually healthy, whether nutrients are even to be found in them because of soil depletion, whether you’re being duped on calories, etc. Buying a vehicle requires that you dump an extra needless ten hours to ensure you are being sold the right thing with the right terms. Moving apartments requires that you scope out reviews to ensure your landlord isn’t a sociopath.
For news it’s all the same problems made worse. Unions bad because GDP? Is GDP relevant to me? But GM workers just got a 25% pay bump. Should I dwell on crime? Should I dwell on immigration? Do I have an obligation to consider the war? There is no organization you can trust, you have no idea who is running it and there’s been a “survival of the fittest” selection of liars, which is incentivized by consumer capitalism. If you are a rootless atomized American you become your own tribal leader, your own high priest, your own adviser, which means you feel obliged to pay attention to the news. You do that, or you become one of the mindless conformists which this forum shits on. What a great choice!
You make this sound like an extremely onerous burden, to me it sounds like the basic requirements for being a free thinking and even modestly rational person.
I don't think I'm particularly tempted by the idea of handing over control of my beliefs to anyone in particular, even if there are people I broadly trust like say, Scott, I disagree with him on many things and always prefer to think for myself in domains where I believe I can interpret the evidence.
Maybe what you describe is a far bigger issue for what we might less than politely term as midwits, who are smart enough to spot inconsistencies in the narrative but are incapable of delving deep enough to figure things out for themselves.
And where I can't do so myself, I have little problem in tolerating uncertainty or ambiguity.
Being a free thinking and rational person is not the normal state of humanity, never has been, will likely never be and can only be obtained at onerous efforts that only make sense for everyone to the ideological zealot.
The immense complexity of the world will be and already has become the doom of the liberal vision, because there is no stable world where everyone is an accomplished philosopher king.
Reason took it's best shot at hierarchy and trust, and is slowly seeing victory escape it's grasp as it is unsustainable on its own.
Trustworthy institutions must exist. And though tyranny must be prevented, all men can't be expected to desire freedom.
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I think the problem is that these self-made humans are going to be less efficient, less effective, and more stressed as a result of always needing to “turn on the news” and triple-check whether they are being duped. It decreases rationality as a whole because of the needless time spent thinking about whether we are being deceived in our daily or weekly decisions. It’s not about wit levels, but more that we are fretting away our wits needlessly. I recall what David Lynch said about eating the same thing every day at the same time and place, that it gave his mind the room to think about what truly matters. So it could be if we all had trustworthy authorities above us, as a hypothetical child might have an ideal father. If someone can outsource his cognition on trustworthy black boxes then a whole world of rationality opens up where you can think about more and truly important things.
I am the only SMH I have access to, unless I end up cloning myself, but it certainly doesn't seem to me like I'm any less effective or efficient, or even particularly stressed.
Maybe the latter, but I strongly prefer useful stress that motivates me in getting to the bottom of the mystery to blissfully becoming beholden to what pundits claim. And if I think that the stress itself isn't useful because I'm genuinely out of my depth, then while I can't guarantee it, I'm pretty good at just not worrying about it too much.
I don't really disagree, but such an entity doesn't exist, and likely won't until we make an aligned superintelligent AGI for ourselves. I'd still prefer to just make myself smarter with its aid so I can figure things out for myself.
In the interim, it's not particularly unbearable to stand on my own two feet atop my brains, and it beats the available alternatives I can see!
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