I've stayed away from news from the vast majority of sources for the last 40 years or so. Can't trust any of it. Anytime I ever saw the news about something where I already knew the facts, I'd see it on the news like some totally different event clearly focussed on sensationalism. If I can't believe what I know about, why would I trust anything else?
A while back now, I saw a video about events in the Ukraine. It looked totally ridiculous. On an impulse, I asked AI to fact check it. It was an eye opener. The propaganda on both sides was evident. So I started to do that more often. AI can be told to objectify events, cut through the hype, and give a short synopsis of whatever is really happening. Sure, it's still big data, and it's still coming from sources with an agenda, but at least for the time being, it seemed to be MUCH better than watching the news itself.
Just recently, I setup a routine news filter. Scan local events, do a fact check, eliminate news cast versions and reporter interpretations, and give me a very fast update. A wee bit later I added global events, but not global local (no school shootings in Arizona or south Africa).
It took quite a few tweaks, but I'm pretty happy with the news feed I'm getting now. It feels more like the news I used to watch back in 50s & 60s.
I fully anticipate that big data will figure out what I'm doing and then start to bias the reports I get. But for right now, I'm reasonable happy with it. It seems like it's more factual and informative, it totally skips the hype and politics, and it's all very brief.
I think this is extremely unhealthy for our society, because it's the logical extension of what "social media" has done, which has been to isolate "like-minded" people in information bubbles and making them suspicious, distrustful, and dismissive of anything said by "outsiders". The damage to our shared understanding of reality is evident around us in extreme political polarization and the awful regimes that spawns, as well as in the broad rejection of actual expertise, particularly in science. And now what you're proposing is isolating yourself not within a "tribal bubble", but in an individual bubble in which you don't need
anyone to agree with you. That's not just
socially unhealthy, it's
mentally unhealthy. And it doesn't take a genius to see the irony in the similarity between that and Ted Kaczynski's approach, given that his actions were the product of hatred of the technology you now embrace.
Side note: We all lived through the Cold War, during which much of the world believed that an American invention - atomic bombs - were at the greatest risk of destroying not just societies, but possibly humanity altogether. Ironically, that's exactly what's been happening over the last decade (i.e. post-Cold War), only the American inventions doing it aren't bombs. They're "smart phones", "social media", and "reality television". It's probably time to add AI to that list.
When I was growing up in small-town Alberta, my parents maximized the information flow into our house, subscribing to
two nearby-city daily newspapers, the local weekly, and a constantly mailbox-stuffing array of magazines from
Time to
The New Republic to
The Atlantic to
The Saturday Review to
Harper's to
The Nation to
The New York Review of Books to
Commentary to
The Kainai News (published by one of the local Indian bands - they had a particularly sharp editorial cartoonist named Everett Soop) and probably a few more than don't spring to mind at the moment. But one that really stood out to me in later years (probably in my 20s) was
The Alberta Report, which was a magazine closely associated with what became the Reform Party movement. My parents were decidedly left-leaning (which I could get into further, but won't here), so at some point I asked my dad why he continued to support a magazine that was generally opposed to his views. His answer was "How else are you going to keep an eye on the bastards?"
And the way I've conducted my life has reflected that broader view. There's a maxim that I took to heart early and earnestly:
If you're stupid, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
This will not happen if you tailor to the last stitch all of the information you're exposed to, and I can't imagine a life more boring than one lacking honest and vigorous debate. I get lot of shit for "arguing" with people. I have two answers to that criticism:
"Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig. You're gonna get dirty, you're gonnna lose, and the pig likes it."
and
"I'm not arguing. I'm Jewish."
Of course, there are valid opposing views to the total-information-immersion approach, notably from
Neil Postman in his 1985 book
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I made a point of re-reading it while on my road trip to Long Island in 2019 to pick up the first of my SuperCats - I thought it was about time I did so, and it was a nice fit because Postman lived in Queens, where I was headed. Part of his thesis was that we don't even have any business paying attention to any
news that doesn't directly affect us, let alone wasting our brains on television trash. And it's a jarring read when you do so in the context of not only the Internet (which only erupted toward the end of his life) but "social media". Here's what his son has had to say about it:
The ascent of Donald Trump has proved Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was right. Here’s what we can do about it
www.theguardian.com
I can't recommend highly enough reading Postman's books. One of the great delights of the early 90s was his weekly appearances on CBC (on Peter Gzowski's
Morningside) for a season. I'd love to find those in their archives.
But to return to the subject at hand... No, what you're doing
isn't even wrong. After all, if all you do is immerse yourself in "friendly" information, and exclude views not to your liking - including the obviously biased ones - you will quickly lose even the faculty to recognize them when they appear, leaving you particularly vulnerable to lies, bullshit, and ultimately exploitation. And if you think you're too smart for that, think again. Pay attention to the (minority of) students who are rejecting the use of AI because they've
already recognized that it leads to decay in their own congnitive reasoning abilities.
