We live in a world in which technology has increased people’s ability to sell bullshit. But it has also increased our options to check information and decide on our own if we believe it. The trust we once had for information sources is mostly gone – I find myself quoting the source and explicitly stating that I am just relaying information and not endorsing it way more often than I did. Sadly the ability of assholes usually evolves faster than our own ability to call them on their bullshit.
So it is weird to me that we haven’t become more wary of what people we know tell us. One would think that in the age where we don’t adopt any conclusions without checking with multiple sources, we’d do the same when information is shared privately – and one would be wrong. In other words – the government is lying to us, the media is lying to us, but what we hear at the bar is all true.
I’ve recently tried to become less susceptible to these kinds of one sided stories and try to check the other side before creating an opinion. I’ve been called out on adopting other people’s opinions a few times in the past and I’m trying to be better at this. But this means work and a few additional variables with all information you store in your brain – source and reliability. So now whenever I hear something I try to check it before I store it memory – and if I can’t, I store it as a rumour with a low reliability score, just as I would when I hear something on the news.
Adopting this has made me more content with myself, but also made it harder to converse with people who refuse to question things they have been told.
