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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
October 11 - October 19, 2023
framing it as a two-sided issue.
Suppressing one’s instinct to interpret and speculate, until the totality of evidence arrives, is a skill that detectives and doctors train for years to develop. This is not something we regular humans are good at; in fact, we’re wired to do the opposite. The human mind “first believes, then evaluates,” as one psychologist put it.
The science shows that not only are we bad at remaining skeptical, we’re also bad at correcting our beliefs when they’re proven wrong. In a University of Michigan study called
“When Corrections Fail,” political scholars Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined a phrase for it: the “backfire effect.”3 After being shown a fake news article, half of the participants were provided with a correction at the bottom discrediting a central claim in the article—just like one you might see at the bottom of a blog post. All of the subjects were then asked to rate their beliefs about the claims in the article.
Those who saw the correction were, in fact, more likely to believe the initial claim than those who did not. And they held this belief more confidently than their peers. In other words, corrections not only don’t ...
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What happens is that the correction actually reintroduces the claim into the reader’s mind and forces them to run it back through their mental processes. Instead of prompting them to discard the old thought, as intended, corrections...
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Here’s the reality: Making a point is exciting; correcting one is not.
An accusation is much likelier to spread quickly than a quiet admission of error days or months later.
Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived afterward. We’re drawn, subconsciously, to fit and contort all the subsequent knowledge we receive into our framework, whether it fits or not.
Psychologists call this cognitive rigidity. The facts that built an original premise are gone, but the conclusion remains—the general feeling of our opinion floats over the collapsed foundation that established it.
Information overload, “busyness,” speed, and emotion all exacerbate this phenomenon. They make it even harder to update our beliefs or remain open-minded.
Rather than cultivate detached skepticism, as proponents of iterative journalism would like, it turns out that the more unbelievable headlines and articles readers are exposed to, the more it warps their compass—making the real seem fake and the fake seem real.
The more extreme a headline, the longer participants spend processing it, and the more likely they are to believe it. The more times an unbelievable claim is seen, the more likely they are to believe it.
The ceaseless, instant world of iterative journalism is antithetical to how the human brain works.
We place an inordinate amount of trust in things that have been written down.
Iterative journalism puts companies and people in an impossible position: Speaking out only validates the original story—however incorrect it is—while staying silent and leaving the story as it was written means that the news isn’t actually iterative.
It is taking one’s conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them. —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects. —WILLIAM HAZLITT, “ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING” (1826)
It is clear to me that the online media cycle is a process not for developing truth but for performing a kind of cultural catharsis. Blogs, I understand from Wilde and Cromer, serve the hidden function of dispensing public punishments. Think of the Salem witch trials: They weren’t court proceedings but ceremonies. In that light, the events three hundred years ago suddenly feel very real and current: They were doing with trumped-up evidence and the gallows what we do with speculation and sensationalism. Ours is just a more civilized way to tear someone to pieces.
Our online culture is both fueled by and ruled by this bitterness and anger that pretend that other people aren’t human beings.
We got rid of public shaming as a form of criminal punishment because it is cruel. We definitely shouldn’t be doing it to people without a trial.
Lincoln lived long before the internet, but in one of his early speeches he made a warning that echoes to this day: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
“public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry.”
To be called a douche or a bro or any such label is to be branded with all the characteristics of what society has decided to hate but can’t define. It’s a way to dismiss someone entirely without doing any of the work or providing any of the reasons. It says, “You are a fool, and everyone thinks so.” It is the ultimate insult, because it deprives the recipient of the credentials of being taken seriously.
Snark encourages the fakeness and stupidity it is supposedly trying to rail against.
The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the public is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not realities themselves but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses. The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts and not what actually is. —WALTER LIPPMANN, LIBERTY AND THE NEWS
This is always a good question: What if everyone did what you were doing? What would that world look like?
What’s known as news is not a summary of everything that has happened recently. It’s not even a summary of the most important things that have happened recently. The news, whether it’s found online or in print, is just the content that successfully navigated the media’s filters.
The news funnel: ALL THAT HAPPENS ALL THAT’S KNOWN BY THE MEDIA ALL THAT IS NEWSWORTHY ALL THAT IS PUBLISHED AS NEWS ALL THAT SPREADS
But we seem to think that the news is informing us!
The process is simple: Create a pseudo-event, trade it up the chain, elicit real responses and action, and you have altered reality itself.
the defining feature of our world today: a blurred line between what is real and what is fake; what actually happens and what is staged; and, finally, between the important and the trivial.*
The anxiety of the media becomes the anxiety of the world, and it becomes the weakness by which the powerful are able to control and direct us.
The news might be fake, but the decisions we make from it are not.
When you see a blog begin with “According to a tipster . . . ,” know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.
When you see “We’re hearing reports,” know that “reports” could mean anything from random mentions on Twitter to message-board posts, or worse.
When you see “leaked” or “official documents,” know that really means someone just e-mailed a blogger, and that the documents are almost certainly not official and are probably fake or fabricated for the purpose of making desired information public.
When you see “BREAKING” or “We’ll have more details as the story develops,” know that what you’re reading reached you too soon. There was no wait-and-see, no attempt at confirmation, no internal debate over whether the importance of the story necessitated abandoning caution. The protocol is going to press early, publishing before the basic facts are confirmed, and not caring whether it causes problems for people.
When you see “Sources tell us . . . ,” know that these sources are not vetted, they are rarely corroborated, and they are desperate for attention.
When you see someone call themselves a “bestselling author,” know that they probably mean their self-published book was number one in a tiny category on Amazon for five minutes, and the same goes for every “top-ranked” podcast and “award-winning” website.
When you see “We’ve reached out to so-and-so for comment,” know that the blogger sent an e-mail two minutes before hitting “publish” at 4:00 A.M., long after they’d written the story and closed their mind, making absolutely no effort to get to the truth before passing it off to you as the news.
The process for finding, creating, and consuming information has fundamentally changed with the advent of the web and the rise of blogging.
However, the standards for what constitutes news are different, the vigor with which such information is vetted is different, the tone with which this news is conveyed is different, and the longevity of its value is different.
Yet, almost without exception, the words we use to describe the news and the importance readers p...
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Blogs, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, left everything standing but cunningly emptied them of significance.
We’ve been taught to believe what we read. That where there is smoke there must be fire, and that if someone takes the time to write down and publish something, they believe in what they are saying. The wisdom behind those beliefs is no longer true, yet the public marches on, armed with rules of thumb that make them targets for manipulation rather than protection.
And so fictions pass as realities.
Our emotions are being triggered by simulations—unintentional or deliberate misrepresentations—of cues we’ve been taught were important.
Our knowledge and understanding is the final empty, hollow shell. What we think we know turns out to be based on nothing, or worse than nothing—misdirection and embellishment.
Our facts aren’t facts; they are opinions dressed up like facts.
