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How do you motters think about the information you choose to take in from the world, especially through the Internet. I don't really like what my use of the Internet has turned into. As a kid, I used to read a lot of encyclopedias before I had access to the Internet. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever, all of humanity's knowledge, all these different perspectives, available for free. Wow! No more asking my parents to buy another encyclopedia, I can just read anything. The kids who had Internet must be so much smarter than me.
Then, I actually got the Internet. Yeah, porn and video games. A lot of wikipedia, and bash.org, and 4chan, everything2, and some forums too, though, but yeah, I quickly learned why it wasn't the utopia I imagined. Eventually, invisibly so, most of those sources got supplanted by reddit. It seems very hard to escape reddit nowadays because like many others, I was unconsciously trained by the changing realities of search engines to append site:reddit.com to almost all of my search queries. It goes without saying that reddit is an NPC infested shithole, but it's come to a point where I'm just deeply skeptical of what valuable information can be found on the Internet. Everything just feels like clickbait. My experience of using the internet summarized is that if you're watching a documentary instead of reading some boring in-depth report, if you're reading science communications instead of the actual paper, if you're even reading the news instead of whatever primary sources may be available to you, you're getting deceived, you're getting fed an oversimplified narrative, you're filling your memory banks with garbage information that may be useless at best or may even lay the seeds for you to make further incorrect conclusions at worst.
The Internet seems to exist as a compromise between learning nothing at all and taking the time to actually form a complex opinion about something. If you're tired of endlessly mulling over values-based argument (like abortion for example) that obviously have no discursive solution, if you're tired of reading various content where the punchline is capitalism bad (not to say that it isn't, but your feelings won't change the world), if you're tired of reading how a congressman supports [horrible thing] because he voted against a bill titled "[horrible thing] eradication act" but actually filled with dozens of other unrelated provisions, then what do you read? Communities like this are one potential solution, mostly because the audience is more intelligent, but so much of this online discourse is just criticism (in the broad sense of the word) of the normie discourse, and that has the same energy as actual scientists wasting their time on in-depth debunkings of flat earthers.
I've been eating this bad information diet for so long, I don't even know what's good on the Internet anymore. What I can read and feel like I learned about something that's really going on in the world, not just something to convert me to an ideology, not something to get my outraged, not something oversimplified, not something America-centric (once again, broad sense of the word here, reading about, say, hijab protests is pretty much American news).
Best I've come up with is, I guess, blogs like ACX, gwern, cosma shalizi, that type of stuff. It's a complete reversal of what they teach in school, right? Personal blogs--opinion--the lowest tier of source credibility, but, shit, at least they talk about things I haven't heard of before, at least they anticipate skepticism and ask and answer some of the questions I would have asked. I'm also considering just completely reimagining how I use the Internet, ideas include:
Don't use it for the content, use it as a social network prioritizing those who can link the most interesting offline resources: books, organizations, products, and then consume that instead.
Read only financial news, reasoning that if nobody's making money off it, it's not worth knowing about.
Forgo news altogether as a starting point, read only about the future. Prediction markets, superforecasters, McKinsey reports, that type of thing. Reasoning that the most useful, actionable information known now is indirectly incorporated in competent (remains to be seen) individuals trying to predict the future.
Cut my losses, settle for a very plain information diet of "just the facts" type news that I (somehow) curate to not have any culture war bullshit or lurid news and seek the stimulating content else(where?)
It's not that hard to find good content on the internet. Avoid most of social media, porn, clickbait websites, most news sites, etc.
Could you give a few examples of what you consider to be good content?
that is subjective, but Less Wrong, stuff shared on Hacker News (even though it is somewhat left-wing biased at times), substack blogs
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