51–60 of 73 posts
JSTOR, Cochrane reviews, trade journals, and live blogs. Mostly I've gravitated away from "news" to sources. Picking good sources is hard, though. Generally I find it has to be the case that specialists writing about their specialism are the people who knowledge originates with, even when it isn't lay people. Where curation is worth it is in reviews. The London Review of Books will introduce a wide array of new liter…
JSTOR, Cochrane reviews, trade journals, and live blogs. Mostly I've gravitated away from "news" to sources. Picking good sources is hard, though. Generally I find it has to be the case that specialists writing about their specialism are the people who knowledge originates with, even when it isn't lay people. Where curation is worth it is in reviews. The London Review of Books will introduce a wide array of new liter…
How is this not getting more ups? You directly pointed to sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add to this: if you grow into this approach, it's almost impossible to become a "radical" believer in anything; usually any serious discourse has very solid points on both sides, which are formulated by very smart people. It's quite hard to live with it, actually, humans are not built for seeing nuance everywhere.
Define what you mean by radical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When seeing a trend of a common narrative, even if it's socially or corporate driven, look for opposing ideas.
Look for them, sure. And consider the opposite. But if you believe the opposite of the Current Thing all the time, you're just a mindless contrarian. A good recent example of this phenomenon is all the people who denied that Russia would invade Ukraine -- not because of any primary sources or facts, but because they reflexively countered the mainstream consensus. The good news is you can spot these people easily by j…
Obviously, he got votes from a lot of normal Republicans, but there's a decent segment of support for him where people were apolitical before, but latched on to him out of sheer, immature contrarianism.
So I follow various media via RSS save articles I think interesting and reason on them looking in my notes/feeds history for link and correlation. Such "manual indexing" is mandatory now, propaganda is too powerful to be contained otherwise...
On finding sources: try to scan for news from various countries then select between those in a language you can read. For instance in many countries there are journals in English, few random examples:
- Helsinki Times
- Korea Herald
- Norway Today
- The Citizens (south Africa)
- Japan Times
- Ekatimerini (Greece)
- B92 (Serbia)
- Astana Times
- Ulambataar Post
- TASS / Moscow Times / Siberian Times (not much updated)
- Der Spiegel International (Germany)
- Bangkok Post
- Jakarta Globe
- South China Morning Post
- Taiwan Times
- Sermitsiaq (Greenland, not much updated)
- LRT (Lithuania)
... Pick some, look for others depending on the language you know, check their quality, quantity of posts and put them in a feedreader, consider scoring, and that's already something. Than look for think tanks from various political areas and countries. Than look to well know geopolitical journals. Collect much and test. Then cleanup until you reach a manageable level of news. Collect them in a timeline, annotate correlation anytime you spot something, look for similar stuff (full-text search) when you add a news. In an year you'll already have a certain mass of news-base to spot trends. The rest is up to you: decide where to look for, decide how to evolve your collection. Enjoy and profit from the new awareness.
You can't know "The Real Truth" but in fuzzy logic you can form a reliable enough vision of the world and with it + experience you'll improve. Do not expect immediate results, like for investments or life choices, but in a small number of years your comprehension of the world likely change and if you select well enough your sources and keep adjusting them you likely been able to spot enough propaganda to filter much of the crap out.
You look for information from the original source, not opinions. You take that information and come to your own opinion. You validate your opinion with an open mind and curiosity - look out for people who can challenge their views. You introspect and change your mind. You also say that some information is beyond your comprehension and “too hard to understand”. “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that…
Good luck reading just the 10-Ks or local equivalent for all the companies that you're interested in (not even as a shareholder but as a stakeholder). Will take a lot of hours each week. Same with research papers, data sheets, raw press releases, etc. Like it or not - you have to rely on 3rd party summarization and information selection.
My main trick is simply to know a lot of really smart people in various fields.
I sure as hell don’t go to Reddit. If you think that’s an “obvious” trick for finding credible information, I don’t know what to tell you.
I find it's good for e.g. opinions on products, experiences with treatments, etc. that come from actual humans.