.@HNIJohnMiller .@Imperator_Rex3 1) At their roots, many of the problems we are encountering are *epistemological* problems.
2) Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge - in this context, we are using it to describe "How we know what we know"
3) Most people don't think about their epistemological process day to day. They receive information via external input, and that information passes through various filters and biases and becomes enshrined in their mind as a belief.
4) Taking myself as an example: I hardly ever read "news" articles anymore. Instead, I have set up a network of trusted thinkers from various political backgrounds and with vastly different skillsets, and I rely on them to amalgamate information for me.
5) Using this "network" I am able to triangulate information that proves accurate with a high success rate. Essentially it creates a hivemind of top class thinkers that parse and explain information as it comes in, scrubbing bias and misinformation as part of that process.
6) Each node in the network has its own particular expertise. I place @ThomasWictor in the top tier of information sources for events in the Middle East, for example. @DaveNYviii is top tier for process/congressional events. etc.
7) This epistemological process is vastly different from most peoples', the majority of whom are still directly consuming "News" from their own preferred sources and accepting it as truth.
8) This is why asking questions like "How do you know?" is a good starting point for many of these conversations. Let's take somebody who believes an anonymously sourced comment from somebody familiar with the matter, an old Media classic.
9) When you ask this person "how do you know this is true?", they will usually respond with something that points to the credibility of the outlet in which they found the story. This opens up an easy avenue of attack as every outlet has proven to be unreliable at this point.
10) Another good epistemological query is to ask "If I were a third party, how would I tell which side is telling the truth?" This works exceptionally well for he-said she-said conflicts where the evidence just isn't there.
11) "How would I, an outside observer, tell which memo is accurate?" will be a good starting point for a lot of conversations that happen in the near future.
12) The goal is to get the interlocutor to understand that they are actually forming their beliefs without substantive evidence (which happens all the time). Once you get that, you open a pathway for them to begin questioning their information sources.
13) Questioning your information sources is critical thinking/skepticism 101, the more we can get people to do this, the more truth we will be able to spread.
The End.
The End.
