Thread by @Ame0baRepublic

For the sake of simplicity, every argument has three easy prongs: ethos, pathos, & logos.

It is baffling to me in this day & age people think that ethos does not matter, & I'm going to watch two hours of this one economist who agrees with you about eugenics or whatever.

This is one of the primary reasons our media ecosystem rarely tells the truth — they cannot withstand the pressure of being called close-minded by people who refuse to attempt anything even approximating "moderate," "centrist," or "middle ground" positions.

I'm not smart because I've read every study on the planet or personally know their methodology — that's not smart.

There is too much information in the world and there always has been for that to be an efficient way to use one's mind or time.

Humans use heuristics.

Part of that's making a decision about who's a credible person to listen to in the first place, so I don't feel bad at the possibility somewhere deep within this rambling conservative podcast, there's something of a semblance of a point I may not get to, cuz I save time & energy.

Not to mention there are many, much more unfair criteria other people feel entitled to use every single day to decide who is and is not a credible person — I'm not gonna watch, like, a *new* Candace Owens video to see if *this* time she doesn't lie through her teeth.

We mentally stitch the world together with a patchwork collection of facts, perceptions, & choices, and I don't live to prove my Enlightenment-era Objectivity bona fides to some rando online in a desperate bid to avoid the charge of bias.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

So I, like literally everyone else, evaluate sources & types of information. Sure, intellectually, it's interesting to parse where Donald Trump gets things wrong or right (often within the same sentence) but as a practical matter, I know not to drink bleach because he said so.

I know in the age of information, it's dangerous to teach people to evaluate information this way, because for some reason, people some may consider trustworthy are charlatan preachers or dudes in pickup trucks angry about midi-chlorians.

But this is what thinking is.

Thinking is not what occurs because one has concrete, factual information about every single thing they could possibly think. If you always had that, you wouldn't NEED to!

Thinking is actually the ability to extrapolate information, trends, news, etc. to form valid conclusions.

This is why every TV show has a doctor who knows diagnoses before patients even hit the hospital bed, or a lawyer with mountains of legal code top of mind, because our popular conception of an intelligent person is someone with a lot of facts — not one who knows how to use them.

This perceived obligation is so strong, especially here on Ornithology Daily, that strangers will charge you with "not being able to refute me!!"

You think that's why I'm here? It's not. I'll save you the energy. I read a little bit about the topic. A news story or a presser.

If I was really interested, sometimes I do a deep dive. Maybe I'll watch a couple of breakdowns. I could get a YouTuber or two in here. I peruse a study's abstract or main conclusions. SOMETIMES, I even find something that challenges what I thought about it before, so I compare.

But none of these means what I need to adequately understand a situation is every conceivable "fact" from every conceivable source.

If HUGE alarm bells are ringing in the ethos department, we may not get to pathos or logos. Because you know what?

I can get it somewhere else.

This is how most ppl process information, & it's weird to pretend like it's not.

Bc as my father would've put it: "It doesn't matter how good your food is if no one wants to eat it."

Presentation, trust, & credibility matter. It's not enough to promise a morsel of fact inside.