Thread by @ccneill

Some things I'm chewing on

Do not fully trust a narrative unless you can see the assumptions underlying it and decide whether you agree with them, or at least detect points where you have uncertainty about the claims being made

Related: if you can't find points of disagreement with what someone's saying, or at least places where you're unsure that their statements are fully supported by facts, you may not yet have the epistemic scaffolding to have confidence in their claims

Try to avoid parroting them

Now that everyone understands the importance of narratives, and the ease with which they hijack our brains, you should increase the probability of any given statement you read being bullshit

Someone who is talking their book is not inherently lying to you. But they definitely have an incentive to lie to you. Make sure you at least know if they are talking their book

Cognitive dissonance compels people to do all kinds of wacky things. Look for statements like "it doesn't make sense" backed up by lots of justifications (thx @IAmAdamRobinson)

No one wants to abandon the entire architecture of their belief system and start over. Ever.

Expertise is good. It matters. It's real.

And yet expertise without a high throughput of rapidly updated information will increasingly fail to grasp the rapidly evolving state of our complex, interconnected world

Appeals to authority, leaning on expertise alone absent a demonstrated ability to update quickly on new information, is a sign that someone doesn't want to live in the world we inhabit and would prefer it if everyone just shut up and went back to not questioning them

Just some thoughts. I don't know what I'm talking about either