Did you just publish an article sharing how what you believed to be true, were told to be true, was often replaced by better more accurate information that you came to accept as true and then go on to name-call RFK Jr because the information he presents on vaccines is contrary to what you currently believe to be true? [clears throat]
I’m just going to drop in this piece from 2005 (!) about Wikipedia, Google Print (as it was then called), print encyclopedias, and what constitutes a “good source” of information. I don’t agree with everything I wrote back then, but I stand by most of it: https://lisdom.lauracrossett.com/2005/what-for-and-for-what/.
Thanks for this post, which brought back my own unquestioned childhood sources of info (as well as the very sad news about NatGeo). It also reminded me of the 80s bumper sticker, telling us to "Question Authority." I guess our current uncertainty is where that leads, but I really appreciate your positive conclusion: "If you can embrace curiosity and not become overly fixed in a position, it can actually be a pretty interesting way to live."
I grew up with the World Book! It was the 1985 edition that became the standard for research through middle and high school for me. I even wrote about this last week -- how Wikipedia has become more familiar, how we don't know much about LLMs and how they're shaping the way we communicate, longer term... this is just a fascinating time to be alive, and I'm super glad I'm not the only one noticing this type of change!
This special group was born between 1930 & 1946 = a 16 year span. In 2022, their age range is between 76 and 92.
Interesting Facts:
You are the smallest group of children born since the early 1900's.
You are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war that rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.
You are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.
You saved tin foil and poured fried meat fat into tin cans.
You can remember milk being delivered to your house early in the morning and placed in the "milk box".
Discipline was enforced by parents and teachers.
You are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, you “imagined” what you heard on the radio.
With no TV, you spent your childhood "playing outside".
There was no Little League.
There was no city playground for kids.
The lack of television in your early years meant that you had little real understanding of what the world was like.
We got black+white TV in the late 40s that had 3 stations and no remote.
Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party lines), and hung on the wall in the kitchen (no cares about privacy).
Computers were called calculators; they were hand-cranked.
Typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.
'INTERNET' and 'GOOGLE' were words that did not exist.
Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on your radio in the evening. (your dad would give you the comic pages when he read the news)
New highways would bring jobs and mobility. Most highways were 2 lanes (no interstates).
You went downtown to shop. You walked to school.
The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands.
Your parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into working hard to make a living for their families.
You weren't neglected, but you weren't today's all-consuming family focus.
They were glad you played by yourselves.
They were busy discovering the postwar world.
You entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where you were welcomed, enjoyed yourselves.
You felt secure in your future, although the depression and poverty were deeply remembered.
Polio was still a crippler. Everyone knew someone who had it
You came of age in the '50s and '60s.
You are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland.
World War 2 was over and the cold war, terrorism, global warming, and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life.
Only your generation can remember a time after WW2 when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.
You grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better.
More than 99% of you are retired now, and you should feel privileged to have "lived in the best of times!"
If you have already reached the age of 80 years old, you have outlived 99% of all the other people currently in the world! "You are a 1% 'er"!
And most of the things I "know" aren't true any more.
Thank you. I remember a similar time in my life (taking from the 3 sets of Encyclopedias in the library and merging all the words together to make a "report") and wondering if the people in the events I wrote about felt the same way about everything as it was reported in the Encyclopedia. It always seemed so one sided. Even young kids know that the stories are told by the winners (and possibly liars), so you gotta wonder what pieces you are missing. But where else could we go (back then) to get any additional information outside the narrative? As a, hopefully, older and wiser adult, I trust very little but I don't think that's to my detriment. Where is the information (ultimately) coming from and what do(es) the author(s) stand to gain? Learned this enough the hard way that the only person who cares about me is me, myself and I. And though others might have the best of intentions and want to help and protect me, they aren't me and their stories might not be my stories. I can listen and I can consider but no one is an authority on anything in my life but me. It is difficult to have your beliefs shattered but better to know than not. I can't imagine what life I'd be living now if I didn't have that shattering happen on a regular basis.
It's important to understand the people involved and their incentives. Your newspaper is not full of scrupulous fact checkers and hard thinkers. They are writing something to put between the adverts for their audience. If their audience are racists, maybe they'll cite phrenology. Politicians just want to get elected and will mostly follow what the voters think. Academics should be the people who scrupulously check things, but have pressures around grants, around producing the right answers. Various fields of academia are bound up with whatever the political fashion is.
What has really changed with the internet is that opinions are now globally open to all, like never before. The barriers to entry of newspapers, of newsstands meant limited numbers of opinions available. Alternative media struggled to be heard. And yes, some alternative media and blogs are cranky but some are the real experts on subjects, people who have studied a subject far more deeply than a newspaper journalist or politician.
Legacy media and politics are very much about creating an aura of authority. The money poured into buildings that project greatness. The attractive, well-dressed people with good voices. The way they talk in certainties rather than probabilities. The emphasis on typography and house styles. It reads well as prose, so you might well trust what it says, even though you should probably read someone who understands it, but with a clumsier style.
This post really made me think a lot and connect a lot of dots from my recent reading. Let's see if I can put them all down in a coherent way.
I have often grappled with the idea of knowledge and expertise and the challenge of understanding where smart people are wrong/biased while still being able to trust some things they say. I have to say I've never found a good answer about how to know what information to trust (especially on a topic you don't know much about), but "If you can embrace curiosity and not become overly fixed in a position, it can actually be a pretty interesting way to live." may just be the best way of framing it. For example, someone who doesn't know much about economics could be forgiven for accepting the neoliberal consensus that still dominates US politics, but once I learned more about it, I realized there were many alternative frameworks with valid empirical underpinnings. This is also why I prefer when people admit that they have biases, or even express what political or other leaning they are approaching a study from so that you can better understand where the shortcomings of their arguments may be. This may not be the best way to "win" an argument, but it is much more honest than the person who claims they are "just looking at the facts". However, I still find this hard to reconcile with the people who "do their own research" and can shut down any conversation by claiming that your sources are untrustworthy.
This passage: "The layoffs are part of a much bigger cost-cutting program by parent company Disney" reminds me of the book When McKinsey Comes to Town which describes how McKinsey consultants made many different companies worse for both the workers and the customers/general public by prioritizing "efficiency" and "growth". There are a wealth of examples that follow the same formula as this move by Disney.
Finally, especially since you have written about AI recently, this piece from The Verge (linked below) really opened my eyes to the background of AI and how incredibly human it all is. When you said "but we can’t be to surprised about their power and persistence given the difficulty of identifying truly reliable authorities. And now we have Large Language Models like ChatGPT which will answer any question with apparent great confidence whether what it is sharing is accurate or not." it made me think of this article. There were several passages that mentioned experts like lawyers being paid more to correct LLM's output for legal research. Basically it seems to me that not only is AI just another layer to hide the real, underpaid human workers that power the models, but it seems to also be a way to hide the bias of the information it is presenting. I really think many people working on LLMs believe that they are aggregating all of human knowledge to create a powerful source of information, but it seems to me to just be covering up the biases of the existing sources of information and whoever tech companies decide to hire as experts to rate the outputs of the models. In the end, it seems to only be abstracting the problem to another level where it's harder for most to see the bias, rather than doing anything to solve the problem of finding accurate information. https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots
Enlightening and thought provoking as usual. Eerie how similar your early experiences with research are to mine, despite some disparity of years. NatGeo and the World Book, sigh. There did come a day when I realized, however it was, that the World Book was not the dependable source that I thought, and it shook my childish sense of security. In other news, thanks so much for recommending Small Things Like These. It's you who are responsible for the fact that I read and love Claire Keegan. I have programmed Foster for my book club.
Did you just publish an article sharing how what you believed to be true, were told to be true, was often replaced by better more accurate information that you came to accept as true and then go on to name-call RFK Jr because the information he presents on vaccines is contrary to what you currently believe to be true? [clears throat]
I’m just going to drop in this piece from 2005 (!) about Wikipedia, Google Print (as it was then called), print encyclopedias, and what constitutes a “good source” of information. I don’t agree with everything I wrote back then, but I stand by most of it: https://lisdom.lauracrossett.com/2005/what-for-and-for-what/.
Thanks for this post, which brought back my own unquestioned childhood sources of info (as well as the very sad news about NatGeo). It also reminded me of the 80s bumper sticker, telling us to "Question Authority." I guess our current uncertainty is where that leads, but I really appreciate your positive conclusion: "If you can embrace curiosity and not become overly fixed in a position, it can actually be a pretty interesting way to live."
Who do I trust? Propublica & PBS
I grew up with the World Book! It was the 1985 edition that became the standard for research through middle and high school for me. I even wrote about this last week -- how Wikipedia has become more familiar, how we don't know much about LLMs and how they're shaping the way we communicate, longer term... this is just a fascinating time to be alive, and I'm super glad I'm not the only one noticing this type of change!
I agree about The Lottery. This story should be taught in every school every year.
A little retrospection
This special group was born between 1930 & 1946 = a 16 year span. In 2022, their age range is between 76 and 92.
Interesting Facts:
You are the smallest group of children born since the early 1900's.
You are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war that rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.
You are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.
You saved tin foil and poured fried meat fat into tin cans.
You can remember milk being delivered to your house early in the morning and placed in the "milk box".
Discipline was enforced by parents and teachers.
You are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, you “imagined” what you heard on the radio.
With no TV, you spent your childhood "playing outside".
There was no Little League.
There was no city playground for kids.
The lack of television in your early years meant that you had little real understanding of what the world was like.
We got black+white TV in the late 40s that had 3 stations and no remote.
Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party lines), and hung on the wall in the kitchen (no cares about privacy).
Computers were called calculators; they were hand-cranked.
Typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.
'INTERNET' and 'GOOGLE' were words that did not exist.
Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on your radio in the evening. (your dad would give you the comic pages when he read the news)
New highways would bring jobs and mobility. Most highways were 2 lanes (no interstates).
You went downtown to shop. You walked to school.
The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands.
Your parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into working hard to make a living for their families.
You weren't neglected, but you weren't today's all-consuming family focus.
They were glad you played by yourselves.
They were busy discovering the postwar world.
You entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where you were welcomed, enjoyed yourselves.
You felt secure in your future, although the depression and poverty were deeply remembered.
Polio was still a crippler. Everyone knew someone who had it
You came of age in the '50s and '60s.
You are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland.
World War 2 was over and the cold war, terrorism, global warming, and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life.
Only your generation can remember a time after WW2 when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.
You grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better.
More than 99% of you are retired now, and you should feel privileged to have "lived in the best of times!"
If you have already reached the age of 80 years old, you have outlived 99% of all the other people currently in the world! "You are a 1% 'er"!
And most of the things I "know" aren't true any more.
Thank you. I remember a similar time in my life (taking from the 3 sets of Encyclopedias in the library and merging all the words together to make a "report") and wondering if the people in the events I wrote about felt the same way about everything as it was reported in the Encyclopedia. It always seemed so one sided. Even young kids know that the stories are told by the winners (and possibly liars), so you gotta wonder what pieces you are missing. But where else could we go (back then) to get any additional information outside the narrative? As a, hopefully, older and wiser adult, I trust very little but I don't think that's to my detriment. Where is the information (ultimately) coming from and what do(es) the author(s) stand to gain? Learned this enough the hard way that the only person who cares about me is me, myself and I. And though others might have the best of intentions and want to help and protect me, they aren't me and their stories might not be my stories. I can listen and I can consider but no one is an authority on anything in my life but me. It is difficult to have your beliefs shattered but better to know than not. I can't imagine what life I'd be living now if I didn't have that shattering happen on a regular basis.
It's important to understand the people involved and their incentives. Your newspaper is not full of scrupulous fact checkers and hard thinkers. They are writing something to put between the adverts for their audience. If their audience are racists, maybe they'll cite phrenology. Politicians just want to get elected and will mostly follow what the voters think. Academics should be the people who scrupulously check things, but have pressures around grants, around producing the right answers. Various fields of academia are bound up with whatever the political fashion is.
What has really changed with the internet is that opinions are now globally open to all, like never before. The barriers to entry of newspapers, of newsstands meant limited numbers of opinions available. Alternative media struggled to be heard. And yes, some alternative media and blogs are cranky but some are the real experts on subjects, people who have studied a subject far more deeply than a newspaper journalist or politician.
Legacy media and politics are very much about creating an aura of authority. The money poured into buildings that project greatness. The attractive, well-dressed people with good voices. The way they talk in certainties rather than probabilities. The emphasis on typography and house styles. It reads well as prose, so you might well trust what it says, even though you should probably read someone who understands it, but with a clumsier style.
This post really made me think a lot and connect a lot of dots from my recent reading. Let's see if I can put them all down in a coherent way.
I have often grappled with the idea of knowledge and expertise and the challenge of understanding where smart people are wrong/biased while still being able to trust some things they say. I have to say I've never found a good answer about how to know what information to trust (especially on a topic you don't know much about), but "If you can embrace curiosity and not become overly fixed in a position, it can actually be a pretty interesting way to live." may just be the best way of framing it. For example, someone who doesn't know much about economics could be forgiven for accepting the neoliberal consensus that still dominates US politics, but once I learned more about it, I realized there were many alternative frameworks with valid empirical underpinnings. This is also why I prefer when people admit that they have biases, or even express what political or other leaning they are approaching a study from so that you can better understand where the shortcomings of their arguments may be. This may not be the best way to "win" an argument, but it is much more honest than the person who claims they are "just looking at the facts". However, I still find this hard to reconcile with the people who "do their own research" and can shut down any conversation by claiming that your sources are untrustworthy.
This passage: "The layoffs are part of a much bigger cost-cutting program by parent company Disney" reminds me of the book When McKinsey Comes to Town which describes how McKinsey consultants made many different companies worse for both the workers and the customers/general public by prioritizing "efficiency" and "growth". There are a wealth of examples that follow the same formula as this move by Disney.
Finally, especially since you have written about AI recently, this piece from The Verge (linked below) really opened my eyes to the background of AI and how incredibly human it all is. When you said "but we can’t be to surprised about their power and persistence given the difficulty of identifying truly reliable authorities. And now we have Large Language Models like ChatGPT which will answer any question with apparent great confidence whether what it is sharing is accurate or not." it made me think of this article. There were several passages that mentioned experts like lawyers being paid more to correct LLM's output for legal research. Basically it seems to me that not only is AI just another layer to hide the real, underpaid human workers that power the models, but it seems to also be a way to hide the bias of the information it is presenting. I really think many people working on LLMs believe that they are aggregating all of human knowledge to create a powerful source of information, but it seems to me to just be covering up the biases of the existing sources of information and whoever tech companies decide to hire as experts to rate the outputs of the models. In the end, it seems to only be abstracting the problem to another level where it's harder for most to see the bias, rather than doing anything to solve the problem of finding accurate information. https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots
Enlightening and thought provoking as usual. Eerie how similar your early experiences with research are to mine, despite some disparity of years. NatGeo and the World Book, sigh. There did come a day when I realized, however it was, that the World Book was not the dependable source that I thought, and it shook my childish sense of security. In other news, thanks so much for recommending Small Things Like These. It's you who are responsible for the fact that I read and love Claire Keegan. I have programmed Foster for my book club.