Obsessing over having the capability to make a decision-- and then simply ignoring that capability in standard practice, for a good percentage of the time--- Really, it just seems absurd to me.
It's a crutch, wierd, that lets people pretend they're underinformed instead of underequipped to process the information in front of them.
Humanity knows a lot of things, but individual people can only learn so much, especially on an amateur basis, so there is a vast and widening gulf between the average public understanding and the actual state of any given art. Nobody likes being average or a member of the outgroup, so we tell ourselves that we're really capable of fully understanding everything if only all the relevant facts were in front of us. 24-hour news networks, like academic journal paywalls and mystery cults, are a convenient psychological focusing point for our anxiety at not understanding things. They let us convince ourselves that we are simply not told the whole story, rather than that the whole story is bigger and more complex than we have time to appreciate before we get back to work, and that gives us some specific external factor to rail against. They are driven by two of the most basic principles in running a con: first, that the easiest person to con is always yourself, and secondly that the best way to get someone to believe something wholeheartedly, even in the face of countervailing evidence, is to let them think they're too smart to be conned into thinking the opposite. Thus anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and cable news audiences.
They're not selling news, man, and they couldn't if they wanted to. They're selling the fantasy that everyone watching is uniquely capable of recognizing that they're not selling news, and would understand everything if only they knew the truth.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 8577273 times)