alt Hacker NewsThe reality is that nothing in life can be trusted but everything can be modeled.
For example, you never know what a driver going 60 miles/hr will do, but you do know that the laws of physics say that the driver can’t suddenly go backwards.
Once you figure this out, you realize you can work through absolute chaos because you can work with black boxes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is lying. For example, the source might say there’s this magic pill that has cured cancer, but if that were actually true, we wouldn’t have chemotherapy still. Therefore, without ever having to grapple with the question of the trust, the actual truth is bounded between “fake news” and “there maybe be potential new developments.” If you still care, you can still look into it, but 3 seconds of modeling already gave you a good black box answer.
What people mistakenly do is try to determine if the statement is true or not, but that’s a waste of time in most cases. It’s better to model the system enough to work within it and then move on.
Sure, but I think the media mostly misleads through omission and shifting the focus.
It seems trivial, but on a national or global scale, so many things happen that it becomes a powerful force.
Every day, the media ignores millions of events that happened in the country. It only reports on a few hundreds. The way it chooses what is important give it massive power.
Every day, some politicians somewhere act in a corrupt manner. The media covers a tiny fraction of those. Instead the media might fill the space with celebrity gossip. This creates a false impression that things are alright when they are not.
Unfortunately it's hard for us to get a general sense for how people in our society are doing because our perception is badly distorted.
My sense is that our current society is terrible and many people are harmed and left behind but the suffering is covered up and nobody is held accountable. This is based on what I've observed of people who I used to go to school with (for example).