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3 reasons for information exhaustion – and what to do about it
Information Exhaustion: Reasons
- Uncertainty: Be it diseases, the political landscape, the global concerns of war, environment and other ongoing crises, we have truckloads of uncertainty in our hands, which is stressing us out.
- Polarization: We are more polarized than anytime in history, trapped in our echo chambers, with our mind filled with confirmation bias. The distrust we have of those who don’t think like us fuels our polarized mindset.
- Misinformation: Fake news is everywhere, and it is not just to spread misinformation, but to impair our critical thinking abilities.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
An Uncertain World
The ongoing epidemic, due to its unknown nature, has provided us with a lot of uncertainties related to the characteristics, severity, mortality rate, infectious rate and spread of the disease. The...
Kinds of Uncertainty
- Epistemic Uncertainty: Uncertain information and data about the past or present, which can be unraveled by using measuring tools.
- Aleatory Uncertainty: The unknown things about the future related to randomness, luck, chance or indeterminacy.
- Deep Uncertainty: Also called radical uncertainty, it is a state in which there are so many unknown things that the future looks like an abyss.
Statistics Vs The Truth
In statistical science, risk is an important uncertainty, but a comparing of risks sometimes does not take into account certain human factors, leading to misinformation or even disinformation. This is due to the statistical models being oversimplifications of the real world.
Statistical data is a ‘Map’, not the actual territory.
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Key Ideas
Spirituality
The term spirituality has one of two connotations: One is a classic religious one; the other is inspired by New Age Culture. Both categories embody spirituality better than cold, hard...
Reason is more of a guide
In a world where we can have complete information about everything, reason can give us certain answers. However, the world we are living in is not even close to having all the answers. In this world, words are fallible. So is perception and imagination.
Reason is then more of a guide than a symbol of truth.
The limits of understanding
There are limitations to what the human mind can understand. The mysteries of the Universe and our conscious experience are too complex to be restricted to words and formulas.
We mostly operate on faith and habit in ways that aren’t obvious.
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Key Ideas
The illusory truth effect
It's our tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure to it.
The illusory truth effect is the reason why advertising and propaganda works.
Why repetition reinforces a belief
The typical explanation is that our brains take shortcuts to save energy:
- Statements presented in as easy-to-read color are judged as more likely to be true.
- Aphorisms that rhyme (like “what sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals") seem more accurate than non-rhyming versions.
Carl Sagan
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. ”