Alexander Webb's Blog, page 2

Remember to Vote

Well, here we are, another election staring us in the face; like a revolver with a mystery number of bullets loaded and there’s an exclusive club of self-serving sociopaths that get to fiddle with it before you take the first pop at your own tonsils.

I’ve mentioned before that I think mass misinformation is a modern pox; so I thought I would do something to address this deficiency of good, reliable information. After all, it is a well known fact I have no biases whatsoever and am always right. Thus, I present to you the summary of the current political situation, for your convenience and clarity:

I should clarify that —despite what my previous statements seem to be implying— I do think you should vote. As much as individual votes lack the ability to change the outcome, we still need to put them in. After all, democracy means you have to outnumber the chronically selfish, the media-pitchforks and the billionaires’ fanboys; otherwise it doesn’t count. So, remember to vote.

Unless you’re a self-centered bellend. In which case, sleep in; you people are well ahead already.

Presumptive Prescription of Proactive Procrastination Prevention

It’s around this time of year I get all nostalgic for videogames I got as Xmas presents: Age of Empires, Baldur’s Gate 2… Mount & Blade Warband. Actually, I didn’t get that one as a present, so I’m not sure where the association comes from. But I’m also reminded of where I was this time last year, and it seems like every year it gets more unbelievable how little I’ve progressed.

This time last year, I was attempting NaNoWriMo again in order to finish the sequel (or one of them) to Cloudgazer. In it, there’s a scene where we get a look into the past of the main character Kiy, shortly after he became separated from his little sister Julene. There is this one scene where a young Kiy is bracing himself for the harsh reality that it may take him as long as a year to find her, as unbearable as that sounds. Those who read the first book (and the start of this one) know however, that Kiy will still be looking for her some 11 years later. I can sympathise with Kiy here, as I feel this is how so many of my project timescales go when I think back to the aspirations of my younger self.

I find it a little hard to believe I’ve been in the adult world, trying to make games and books and things, for nearly 20 years now. In that time, I’ve started so much and finished so little. It doesn’t seem to work to simply say “Alright, that’s enough, I’m going to finish something”, because I’ve said that enough times. When you don’t get the outputs you want, you have to change the inputs. So, a change of tactic is in order.

At the start of this year I tried out what I call the Monthly Mission system: set a single target for the end of the month that’s measurable and achievable, then so long as you meet it you don’t have to give up all your time to your projects but still keep moving forward. Sounds great in practice, but I’ve missed just about every monthly target since January.

I know I should reduce the amount of things I’m trying to do, but I am having a lot of trouble with that; I’ve had (what I strongly feel is) a brilliant design for a game pretty much sitting on the desk for the past 12 months, taunting my lack of time management and limited number of heads and/or limbs.

I recently came across Yahtzee Croshaw’s “12 Games in 12 Months” challenge, where the reviewer from Zero Punctuation attempts to build 12 videogames in a year and shares the process in a video blog. It’s a great process and some good concepts have come out of it already. Now, I’ve no doubt I can make a truckload of excuses for why I can’t make 12 games in a year: I just had a child; this gig is presumably his day-job so he can spend the full day on it; etc. But clearly it’s not all he’s doing, as he’s still got his reviews and such. Besides, I don’t have to make 12 games in a year; one would be a bloody good start.

The key is motivation–or perhaps a better term: momentum. Croshaw mentions this himself a few times, that need to keep on hammering at a project to see it through comes from more than just wanting to get it done. You have to be swimming in it, keep it loaded in the brainspace when you can. But I’m finding it hugely inspiring that such a thing is possible. Maybe a little self-belief is needed here.

So then, my approach now? Start everything I feel like, but keep it small and get it out there. See it through, get it online and into the hands of players and move on to the next thing. Maybe even blog about it too, who knows.

So Here We Are

I can scarcely believe it’s been 18 months since I last published something on this blog. I swore not to do any more of these “oh look how long its been I promise to write more soon” bullshit posts, so I suppose that’s probably why. What you don’t see, is the mountain of unfinished drafts that have been started in the interim, but which have not yet achieved a degree of quality or completion yet that I feel they’re ready for the great wild web.

So here we are. I’m still trying to write, and code games. I have a new day-job, web development, but I’m still working on pretty much all the things I was working on at the start of 2018. Scratch that, at the start of 2017 things didn’t look all that different. It’s tough to maintain momentum. But if talking about it will help, perhaps this is what I need.

The most significant thing that has happened is that I have gained a daughter; Lucy and I are now proud parents. That might seem to put stagnating timescales of personal projects into perspective, but as she’s only been around for a month or so I don’t think that’s fair on her.

Life, uh… finds a way I guess. Of getting in the way. One way or the other.

But I feel optimistic. Parenthood is an exciting time, and honestly, it is no exaggeration to say I am inspired every day. I never claimed to be the greatest person at time management. But perhaps, if I could just improve it a little, the fruits of all the years of work on so many projects might start to at least see the light of day.

Over A Fifth Of Our Atmosphere Is Now Toxic Gas!

Isn’t it outrageous that headlines can grab people’s attention by saying things that just aren’t true? This sort of click-bait title tries to assert things without basis and relies on people not checking them or getting sucked in by the hype, right? We need to get back to talking about facts! Show your research! The lies and propaganda have gone too far. Right?

Well, we can crack-down on fact-checking, but as our hypothetical headline-writer will smugly assert, the article title above is true; factually speaking. It is, of course, also completely misleading. Therein lies the issue.

The Obfuscated Truth

Just over one fifth (20.95%) of our atmosphere is made up of oxygen. Oxygen is a toxic gas: high enough levels in the air will cause serious damage to the nervous system and lungs. Forget that you also need it to breathe– we’ll skip over that because it doesn’t sell our agenda. We also used the word “now”, indirectly claiming that it hasn’t always been this way. Also true; prior to the Carboniferous period, there was much less oxygen around than there is today. Of course the word “Now” in a headline like this implies human timescales –not to mention heavily suggesting human cause– but again we are sticking with facts so it’s all fine.

Our hypothetical headline writer’s mission in this case is to turn the public against oxygen. Given that the benefits of oxygen are common knowledge, this would be very unlikely to succeed in the real world[*]. However, substitute “oxygen” with something that is also beneficial but can be framed harmfully and it becomes clear how easy it is to deceive without resorting to outright lies. The Dihydrogen Monoxide spoof has been lampooning this very thing for decades.

There is this common notion of propaganda, that it’s just about lying to the public; the sort of bare-faced denial that Iraqi Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf became known for during the 2003 invasion of Iraq (famously claiming “[there are] no Americans in Baghdad”, while American troops were pretty much kicking his door down). But most propaganda doesn’t rely on stuff like this, particularly in democratic countries where such claims are much easier to flat-out disprove. Most propaganda, and the real danger of misinformation, comes from factual truths that are bent to serve an agenda.

First Degree Misdirection

So what we need to seek out, in order to stem the tide of this noxious bullshit, is not so much facts; although we’ll certainly need those. What we need to be most aware of, is understanding what is being implied and suggested by a claim. As this is by its very nature a grey area, we can’t expect it to be straightforward, but there is clearly a range here; where ambiguous and innocent mistakes are at one end and headlines like the article title are on the other. You can’t categorically rule on what something implies or suggests, but you can probably tell the difference between the two ends of this spectrum. The sort of blatant click-bait that is the title of this article clearly intends misdirection of the first degree.

Given that so few people check the sources[**], it should be just as important to demand accuracy in what’s being implied as well as what’s actually being said. This isn’t a new thing, but it’s still a concept thin on the ground in politics and online debates. Of course, the real abusers of misdirection won’t care to change. So it’s up to us, those who encounter the information, to point it out.

* - Although, given the current state of political discourse, I wouldn't want to hedge any bets here.
** - Citation needed.

 

NaNope

Well, I failed NaNoWriMo.

Okay, so “failed” isn’t the most constructive word to use, but I am feeling somewhat masochistic and in need of a stern talking to. This has been a difficult year for me, but I feel I’ve been making a few too many excuses. I’ve been made redundant, headed out onto the hostile airless moon that is Self-Employment, and I published my first book; which nobody knows about and I’m struggling to figure out how to make people know about it. But I am free; what more do I need?

I thought that with my workday effectively under my control, I’d be able to negotiate with myself to get the necessary time I need to write 1,667 words a day (or sixteen-and-a-half centiwords, as I have started to think of it). Problem is, that amount of time with me is a bit long, it would seem. Something like 4-5 hours, most days. Which makes the challenge at best a 150-hour commitment that earns me exactly zero toward my monthly deficit of bills.

I know, I know, “silence your inner editor”. All very well to say that; I am the inner editor. I cannot write trashy throw-away things and such free-form exercises don’t seem to get me very far. I am also aware on some level that if I only did, then some good parts would inevitably stick out of the muck here and there, which could then be reworked into something great. But… ugh, perhaps I’m just too lazy to walk the desert to get there.

Then again, laziness is the evolutionary impulse to seek out optimisations, so another way to put it might be that I’m trying to figure out a better way. I have this sort of issue with a lot of my current coding & game design challenges, too. Do I do it the long-winded and brute-force method that will get it done, or do I sit here effectively doing nothing for hours hoping I’ll come up with a better solution? Well… there’s an argument to be made for either approach, to be honest.

Take a recent example: on my current game, I was plagued by a glitch in floor collisions due to how I wanted to build the levels– for maximum modularity and reusability, as multiple meshes. Try as I might, the game-breaking glitch didn’t seem to have an easy solution. I was left with a choice: redo everything the older, more long-winded way (that I knew worked but took a long time to make and adjust); or try to figure out a fix for my system. I probably took twice as long as it would have taken to just redo the damn level, but I developed a system that would make it work the way I originally wanted, dynamically merging all the scenery colliders at the touch of a button. And any future changes can be handled automatically.

The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies inevitably are, because in writing I probably won’t come up with a better way of doing things than the brute-force word-puke. I also happen to still really enjoy and endorse National Novel Writing Month. But I feel like what works for me might not align with the conventional “you only get there by churning out dirge” mantra. I’m always skeptical of anyone claiming “this is the only way to do it”—unless you are talking about argument from rationality or applying the metric system, of course.

The important thing is, I got 250 centiwords out of it, on the way toward a sequel for Cloudgazer. But for now I need to put it aside and focus on my target of finally wrapping up the long-awaited Chronozone Zero by the end of this year!

The Story of Cloudgazer

This has been a big week for me.

Back in something like 2003, I was laying on my back, looking up at an angled skylight and seeing only lightly clouded sky. I found myself wondering: what if that was down? What would it be like to live in a world where the sky was like an endless ocean, above and around you? Where you travelled in airships between floating cities, like islands in the vast blue void?

Some Beginnings

Over the years, I would start to add to this concept, inspired by a succession of games and films. Azimuth took on many influences and evolved gradually, snowballing in complexity and cutting a slalom of style back and forth as I changed and grew. I began to write a novel about an Azrunite airship clumsily named the Wandering Cloud. It initially involved links with an Earth person, in that goofy early 90s Super Mario Bros Movie sort of way. I soon scrapped that angle because, dammit, I don’t need someone from Brooklyn for my audience to get a clue, or I’m looking at the wrong people. Still, it’s funny to look back on what could have been. Will someone from Earth ever reach Azimuth? I digress.

Despite finishing only a couple of chapters, the eponymous ship would eventually go on to become the Akron; named in honour of the famous US carrier airship*. In 2005, I used the setting of Azimuth, as it had now become known, for my final year project at the University of Bolton: Iron Skies. Despite being an early incarnation of the world, most of the ingredients were already there by this point: Azrune, Ganzabar, the Gold Age… but it was far from being a commercial game. Played by maybe a few dozen, it was then shelved. It was around this time I came up with the sling; a multitool that could double as a weapon; as well as the term for those that used them: “cloudgazers”.

NaNoFreakinWay

In November 2009, I decided I wanted to tackle NaNoWriMo. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s a kind of worldwide self-challenge to write 50 thousand words in 30 days. I already had about a dozen half-finished novels I’d been trying to write, so I didn’t want to start a new concept. I wanted to take the concept I felt was most important to me, the one I needed to get out the most. I chose the Azimuth project. By now, the working title had become ‘Cloudgazer’. I threw myself into NaNoWriMo and, much to my surprise, came out at the end of November with a 50,805 word novel. Awesome, I thought. It’s pretty good, so maybe I’ll publish it in a month or two.

Fast forward over five years. Because, to be honest, I can’t really remember what I was doing over that time. I’d got caught in a loop of editing, making changes, deciding it was all wrong, going back and changing whole fundamental plot points; then rinse and repeat. It was everything you shouldn’t do when editing. That is, it was not structured or orderly and thus wasted huge amounts of time. I was also working in a job that was creatively very draining, so I just didn’t have the energy to pursue it. I was trying to nail down details of the next book so that I didn’t have to be so constrained by published material; I could just change it! This only had the effect of shelving everything in perpetuity.

Self Publishing is the Future

By 2015, though, I’d had enough. Inspired by Hugh Howey’s Wool, I began to read up on his blog posts about self-publishing and how the world of ebooks was changing things. No longer considered a “vanity project”, self publishing was becoming an avenue for the niche and the unheard to have a shot at finding their audience, much as a similar democratisation was changing the gaming scene. I reached out to him for some advice and he kindly obliged: if I could do just one thing as a self-published author, it would be to get a good editor.

So I did. After a year, for some reason**. And I decided to wait another 6 months for him to be free. Hell, it’s been this long, what’s another 6 months before Azimuth sees the light of day? David Gatewood is, it turns out, a great editor. By the end of 2016, Cloudgazer was, for all intents, a completed book. It was also a much slicker, consistent, concise and easier-to-read story than it had been only a few months before. And thanks to his feedback, my writing thereafter has been, as well.

Cover Me, I’m Going In

But of course, the book still wasn’t Ready was it?

No, because when you work on every detail of a fictional universe for over a decade, built a wiki for it, and you’re a writer, artist and game designer, you sort of have a vision of how it should all look. A vision that, you decide, means you have to make the cover art yourself. After all, how long can that possibly take? Spoiler alert: a long frigging time. Especially when you keep changing your mind about composition, colours, styling, 3D / 2D, metaphors, references and programs.

Finally, that was done and it went off to the formatters, the lovely people at Polgarus Studio, who go through the document and convert it for viewing as an ebook. Ebooks essentially view things using html, so the guts of this were not unfamiliar to me. But, much like making a website, I just prefer that someone else deal with it. I feel much the same way about html files as I do about cats: I’m fine with them being a thing, I just don’t want them to be a thing near me.

Once it was all bound up into an ebook file, I had what was essentially the finished book ready to upload to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. But, this being hopefully the final version, the least I could do was read over it one more time to be sure; what a pilot might call a gross error check. Lucy did the same; which between us meant that was another month or so of the book sitting around ready to go.

Is It Over, Yuri?

Finally, the last hiccup or two was straightened out and I had the final completed ebook file. There was a day or so of setting things up with KDP, then Cloudgazer was submitted on July 10th, 2017. It published the day after. And y’know what? It’s still not quite sunk in.

Cloudgazer (Azimuth Series Book 1)




Price: Check on Amazon






‹
›


0?z-b.scroll:z+b.scroll)}),b.auto&&h()}function h(){A=setTimeout(function(){c(z+b.scroll)},b.auto)}function i(){return s.slice(z).slice(0,w)}function j(a){var c;a=y-w+1&&(c=a-x-b.scroll,q.css(o,-(c*t)+"px"),z=c+b.scroll)}function k(a){0>a?z=0:a>y-w&&(z=y-w)}function l(){a(b.btnPrev+","+b.btnNext).removeClass("disabled"),a(z-b.scrolly-w&&b.btnNext||[]).addClass("disabled")}function m(c){n=!0,q.animate("left"==o?{left:-(z*t)}:{top:-(z*t)},a.extend({duration:b.speed,easing:b.easing},c))}var n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z,A,B=a(this);d(),e(),f(),g()})},a.fn.jCarouselLite.options={btnPrev:null,btnNext:null,btnGo:null,mouseWheel:!1,auto:null,speed:200,easing:null,vertical:!1,circular:!0,visible:3,start:0,scroll:1,beforeStart:null,afterEnd:null}}(jQuery);

But, I hope people out there will enjoy reading about Azimuth as much as I have enjoyed hogging it to myself for the last 14-15 years.

You can get the book from that link right here if you like! Or, you can grab it on Kobo here.

 

 

 

(*) - Which, in turn, was named after Akron, Ohio. Hi, Akron!

(**) - No, I don't know how it took me this long, either. Sling happened in this time, but that was only a games jam, so I'm as stumped as anyone.

If in doubt, Politic Rationaly

So I have about half a dozen posts pending publication (and the rest) which are fairly in-depth and thus need to be tightened up a whole lot more. With the UK “Surprise” Election coming up this week (and last year’s ranting on the referendum being my last post of substance), it seemed that now was as good a time as any to talk about politics. You know; when you’re pretty much sick to death of hearing about it.

I profess to have been lured by that most ubiquitous temptation over this last year: to stop caring about the trainwreck that is modern political discourse. “Fake news”, leftie-rightie name-calling, personality politics– it’s all there. Coupled with outcomes that make you roll your eyes and ask how long before our civilisation stops pissing its pants, it’s tempting to just disengage.

Of course, you know better than that, don’t you? We can’t pack up and go home, we’re in this for the long haul. So I’d like to just sum up the bottom line for me, very simply. Not the specifics of “oh Conservatives will do that” and “Labour will give us this”, but my over-arching guideline to making the decision.

Politics isn’t about you. Or Me. Or whoever. It’s about picking the system that does best by everyone. It’s the system you would want if you were going blind into the Game of Society and your role was being picked randomly*.
Your vote isn’t the decider. Individual votes don’t win elections, so stop acting like they do. Media campaigns and mass-reach articles change outcomes; your vote on its own will not. So relax! The weight is off you. Vote for who you agree with. If they win, they didn’t need you anyway and if they lose then it wouldn’t have helped. Nobody won an a UK General Election on a single vote. Just be heard.
Not-voting is the only actually wasted vote. Any vote cast says something. Even if democracy is stupid, insane and inefficient (which it probably is), it only gets worse if you don’t use your vote. And abstinence certainly won’t convince the powers that be to throw a system out, if that’s what you’re hoping. Nothing enforces the status quo like apathy, after all.

So, the short of it is, vote. Or… don’t, I guess. But, I would prefer it… if you did.

(*) – This concept comes from philosopher John Rawls, who coined it the “Veil of Ignorance”. I think modern gamers should be able to understand this concept even easier than Rawl’s contemporaries, as the concept of a fair start is one that games give us a unique perspective of. Imagine you are designing a game’s player classes without knowing which one you will get to play. You would ensure each was well-balanced within the game’s ruleset. Trying to look at life in the same way is the best method to arrive at a fair system.

Return to Action

So I’ve been pretty inactive over recent months due to a number of factors. Probably the biggest was that we bought a house (eek!), but there’s lots going on right now. One thing’s for sure right now; these times, they are a-changin’.

I’ll be posting more shortly. Just got the internet up and running at the new place, so there’s lots to sort.

What’s with all this indecision?

Yes, another article about the EU referendum. No, I’m not going to try and convince you, with my numbers and slides, what I think you should vote for. I would have hoped it’d be clear by this point, incidentally- but I’ll get to that.

People are saying there are lies on both sides. It’s being framed as a colossal struggle against vast amounts of hyperbole and spin. Fair enough. Both camps are making stuff up to back their point; as is constantly being pointed out. But here’s a newsflash: both sides in a political battle always do this. There are people for Leave and Remain that are both in the wrong in claims they’re making and the numbers they cite. But that really isn’t the point. Just because some people make a flawed or erroneous argument, doesn’t mean the point they’re defending is itself wrong. There is actually a staggeringly comprehensive amount of good data on the subject, readily available. We’re really more informed than we’ve perhaps ever been.

Really, the most ridiculous thing about it all is that we had to come up with business statistics to argue why we should stay in the EU in the first place. It’s like trying to justify to your parents why you volunteer at Greenpeace, by presenting a financial business plan citing projected gains from your future contacts in the clean tech industry. It is to completely miss the point of the endeavour, in tenuous pursuit of the meagre money involved.

“It’s like trying to justify to your parents why you volunteer at Greenpeace, by presenting a financial business plan citing projected gains from your future contacts in the clean tech industry.”

The cancerous cynicism that insists the EU is just a tyrannical sham is both a self-fulfilling prophecy (it will hardly serve you if you do everything in your power to ignore/stunt it) and a narrow-minded reading of balance books. It ignores the cultural sway that European unity has (for most continentals, at least) on how people think and behave toward each other. It ignores the fact that, heck, Britain currently has its cake and eats it, as far as its special arrangements with the EU go. Yet still, the public are being persuaded into throwing it away.

Then again, Britain has a history of losing a good thing; despite repeated warnings, despite the correct course of action being clearly on offer; due to little more than imperial arrogance and parochial British jingoism. America did rather well out of it, though.

UKIP and the like scoff at the notion that European Union equates to European Peace. Considering the framework was begun at the end of the second world war, I would say we’re hardly in a position to know any different. Isn’t it just a little co-incidental that nearly 70 years of unprecedented peace in Europe matched the beginning of the European Coal and Steel Community? In the world prior to big conglomerations like the EU and UN, powers like France and Germany gave each other a bloody nose on a regular basis. Just sit for a moment and imagine that happening in the world we live in today.

Now of course I’m not saying this because I think war will happen as soon as cracks appear in the EU, nor do many others making this point. The thing to understand from this, that should be clear to any child of history (as it would have been to anyone at the turn of the Fifties) is that building commonality is progress. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it is working; make it better, don’t abandon it. There’s not gonna be an “EU:2”, that you can opt-into somewhere down the line. This is it. To turn our backs on the EU project is stupid, short-sighted and, above all, backwards.

So like I said, the choice should be obvious. Which will it be: Forwards, or Backwards?

Misinformation Age

When I was a kid, we had a School Computer.

Yes, that’s right, singular. This was the early 90s; it was wheeled between classrooms on a trolley and played a selection of blocky educational games about as engaging as a marketing pamphlet about sensible shoes. Later, there were computer rooms, but we certainly didn’t have mobile phones to consult on any given enquiry. FBI agents on TV had mobile phones; kids at school did not. Teenagers didn’t have an important reason to warrant getting one. That last part hasn’t really changed.

Anyway. The point I’m underlining is how widely available information is. With the powerful array of devices often only a tap from the internet, we’re more plugged-in than ever. Access to incredible resources like Wikipedia have revolutionised autodidactism and even regular taught education. Thanks to the concept of crowd-content, you can find videos about any kind of esoteric thing you are trying to do; from upgrading Nerf guns to learning when to omit the phrase “watashi wa” in Japanese.

But there is a concerning side-effect to the information revolution. The widespread availability of data and the ease by which it is collated, assembled and published has made it even easier than ever for bad information to propagate. And not just spread, but spread unhindered by opposition. For example, we have people who honestly believe the moon landings were faked and can find all the vacuous drivel they need to back them up, which they will spew any time this ludicrous position is challenged. The fact that nobody worth a damn in the whole field of science can take the notion seriously doesn’t matter. Just go to the right place and you’ll find a corner of the internet where the echo chamber resonates your chosen poison.

Now, in theory, what should happen here is that the internet ought to make disproving rubbish and rumour less effort than ever. While it certainly can do that, it seemingly doesn’t. If anything, it makes it easier than ever to find garbage masquerading as reliable information, with which to support a flawed argument. This serves to highlight an awkward facet of human nature: we don’t like things that are true, we like things that are exciting. It’s the reason why any free-market media are, more often than not, scaremongering, doom-chanting hype peddlers.*  The macabre sells far better than the mediocre, after all.

So on the even playing field of the information highway, where everybody publishes everywhere, how do we determine what is valid information from what is garbage, falsehood and chaff? Well it’s not completely level, for a start. The common way to tell if something is being taken seriously is to look at where it comes from. If an article is on the front page of a well-known science journal affiliated with a national or international body of repute, like the ESA, it’s probably going to be a good source. If it’s the rantings of an angry ex-employee of the postal service uploaded to an anonymous tumblr with awful spelling and no links or citations whatsoever, it’s probably a bad one.

But of course an argument from authority is bad logic. Official-looking religious fanatics run huge organisations churning out absolute nonsense with the straightest of faces, while many the obscure whistle-blower or blogger may appear to be a nutcase but have all the facts right. Consider the facts being put forward; do they collate with other (trustworthy) sources? Do they make sense with each other, even? And what is the bias of the person giving the information, do they stand to gain from it being taken seriously? Probably more important, in fact, do they stand to lose if it is proved to be false?

Incidentally (and please forgive me but this is a point of recent contention), the argument from authority is not the same as the argument from expertise. If somebody has spent 30 years studying meteorology and climate science, their opinion will count more in a discussion on climate change than, say, “Mike from Luton” who thinks “it’s probably just a cycle or something, mate”. If somebody’s learned a lot about a subject, they will likely have already been though all your ideas and found the flaws in them. That’s not to say you should just shutup and not suggest anything; sometimes people outside a field can offer new insight. But you do not have equal opinion. I mean, this should be obvious; why does it feel like we collectively don’t understand that a chemist knows more than any random schmuck about chemistry?

I feel like I’ve dwelt a lot on the issues here without sharing my two coin on the solution. Firstly, cross-reference. If somebody says something that seems surprising or out of kilter with what you know, look it up elsewhere. You may even find you were wrong all along and they were telling the truth! I recommend Snopes as a good site for debunking anything you’re suspicious of. Get your news from multiple places when possible. Grasswire is a good impartial source of news, for global stories anyway. Build up a list of trustworthy sources for information. If one of them lies or misleads, strike them off it. You’ll get to know who tells it true by process of elimination. Sources telling the truth will usually recognise and reinforce one another, too; helping you to sort trustworthy from fakes.

And share your findings. Don’t be afraid to correct people who are being misled. Most of us, while we prefer excitement over truth, don’t like to be wrong.

(*) - State Media, on the flipside, are just terminal optimists ad absurdum