Alan Watts and George Carlin on Modern Society

 (1) The Sad Reality Of This World - You Have No Choice ft George Carlin - YouTube

The first speaker is Alan Watts. While I don't entirely agree with Carlin's analysis the trend line is rather clear. He is dead right about education though. While the humanities need much more rigour instead of being captured by various philosophical\political schools of thought the loss of interest in the humanities results in people lacking the context through which to analyze modern politics. We should read history or in the very least watch the excellent Caspian Report and Visual Politik on Youtube. There are plenty of other sources and we should learn to spread our information absorption. As a friend of mine recently told me: I don't agree with Ben Shapiro's politics but on some issues but he provides important insights. 

I have long stopped trusting any mass media outlet or politician. My operating assumption is that they are trying to get something out of me. Which is obviously true: my money or my vote. Yet many people choose their preferred sources and don't bother to check facts. Today I read something interesting about financial forecasting that is applicable to information sources generally:

Nevertheless, there is strong empirical and theoretical evidence that there is a benefit to aggregating different forecasts. Across a number of disciplines, from macroeconomic forecasting to political polling, simply taking an average of everyone's forecast rather than relying on a single one has been found to reduce forecast error, often by about 15 to 20 percent. 

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise.

Interestingly the next chapter is titled, "A Climate of Healthy Skepticism."

Unfortunately because the modern media is so polarised if we choose to become invested in political and social issues we need to read and\or watch much more widely and much more often rather than just switching on our preferred talking heads. We need to learn how to source primary information, we need to acknowledge biases in talking heads including our own, and it is worth learning about our innate cognitive failings. 

The problems with my request.

• Most people are too busy with work and family commitments to put in the required time to adopt a more critical attitude towards the information they receive. 
• Like any skill critical analysis requires practice and discipline. It does not come naturally to us and typically requires mentoring and the appropriate training. The 10,000 hour rule of disciplined practice would be applicable here except that though once widely accepted it has not survived replication studies.😂 The basic idea is still relevant but it is obvious that some people are naturally inclined either through intelligence or personality to more readily develop critical analytic skills. 
• In this information rich age the cognitive demands are often overwhelming. The age of the Renaissance Man era has long passed, it is no longer possible for single individuals to adequately examine all the available information on a given topic. In The Signal and the Noise the author notes that too much information can impede our ability to make the right decisions. There are studies arguing that when confronted with a huge volume of information we tend to resort to the types of error prone heuristics that Kahneman and Tversky reference in Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. 

Is There a Solution?

No.