Information and survival

Response to a friend who documented many different internet news sources to get accurate world news.  The effort was phenomenally detailed and I admire his resourcefulness and dedication:

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This was developed by me starting almost forty years ago after studying research on human information processing and artificial intelligence:

 1.  The human mind is incapable of storing and sorting data without error creeping in.  Even if you judge a fact to be false when you read it, you will remember it as a fact (just a "fact").  Your mind DOES NOT STORE truth evaluations with the data.  Even if you know the reliability of the data when you read it, your mind will remember it as TRUE or FALSE (1 or 0).   This is NOT a trivial feature of the human mind.  (This is how you remember bad information and it happens all the time: "Oh yeah --- I remember hearing about that...:") Because of this, I stopped reading National Enquirer and other junk news almost forty years ago.

I eventually stopped reading the news or watching TV for the same reason.   Your consciousness is not an effective gatekeeper for information storage and retrieval at a dependability level of archival reliability.

The human mind does not store memory like a video recorder, but reconstructs the memory out of different bits and pieces each time an event is "remembered"   This is how solid, factual memories themselves can change over time.  That is why it is so interesting and disturbing to see old movies and videos of ourselves.

2.  Therefore, to avoid my head being filled with propaganda, I just don't listen.  Your brain is NOT an effective gate keeper for propaganda and your memory will accept a fact as true even if you disbelieve and discount it when you hear it.  This is an astounding (and disappointing) feature of the "optimization strategy" of the human mind.
 

 Anything that is very important for me to know will be relayed to me by my friends and associates.  The only thing that really affects me now is food, sleep, hot and cold. ...

3.  Curiously, Except for Fox news, I have not even heard of a single news source on this list.  I am reminded of the phrase "How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?"

copyright (c) 2018
William Schaeffer