Filtering Toxic Content: Is it True?
Yes, you can get better at figuring that out.
You might be tempted to say this is one of your biggest problems, figuring out what is true. But don’t just write the question off. We spend our whole lives learning about reality from the earliest moments when we are able to grasp a toy and put it into our mouths, feeling, tasting, detecting size, temperature, texture, and more. There is no reason to stop learning how to detect truth. Some of us may be more gullible than others, but everyone can learn practical skills to test input.
Most of us rely on a few tactics we picked up years ago and continue to use without thinking. Things like:
— Identifying people and sources we’ve decided to trust. This one often has lots of room for improvement.
— Relying on emotional reactions to inform our brains, assuming the feelings are based on something vague but important we learned in the past. This one can be helpful in a pinch but can also cause trouble.
— Social expectations, picturing in our minds how our preferred social group would react to the information. This one has some serious limitations.
Have you been numbing your ability to discern between truth and lies, fact and fiction? If information is a flood, letting yourself be swept downstream with the flow of your social group, your emotions, and swallowing certain sources whole is not viable.
Improving your ability to discern fact from fiction.
Here are a few simple suggestions.
— With those people and sources you love: check their sources from time to time, especially when the input pressures you in some way.
— Test your emotional response. Focus your mind on identifying what caused the reaction and ask the question, is this a reasonable response?
— Teach yourself to recognize when social pressure is driving your interpretation of the validity of the information.
How will this help you learn to detect truth?
As you apply these simple tests, it gets easier to identify input that is problematic and that alone will make you better at sifting the massive amounts of data available to us every day.
Here’s an example.
Put yourselves back 23 years ago and consider the uncertainty many faced as they heard prophecies like this one. (This is not a quote but a paraphrase of my own formed from a multitude of things said at the time).
“When the year 2000 hits, there will be a cascade of catastrophic computer failures that could be so destructive to the nation that it dissolves into anarchy. We all must sell our homes and move into the mountains with tons of survival equipment and food.”
Is this true?
— Check your sources’ sources. If it was said by someone we trust and perhaps echoed by an influencer we follow, looking up their sources would be a great place to start. Maybe we would find they lead to a description of how the date fields in older computer programs only allowed two digits for the year and the year 2000 would cause all the dates to click over into double zeroes, messing up all the calculations. Maybe we would stop and think, “Didn’t someone see this coming and get ready for it?”
— Check your emotional response. Are we really feeling panicky and thinking we have to sell our houses and run? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Maybe we should calm down before swallowing this idea whole.
— Check the pressures from your social group. Are our friends and family buying into the panic? Are we more concerned about following their lead than stopping to check the info and think it all through?
Believe it or not, there were people who sold their homes and moved out into the boon-docks. Tons of people stocked up on a year’s worth of food, a lot of which no one in their home wanted to eat. And many were scared as New Year’s Eve ticked away and the end of the millennium turned into the new millennium.
It’s easy to laugh at this now, but it was a huge concern at the time and many influential people had a lot to say about it. Having programming background myself, I asked the question, “Didn’t someone see this coming and get ready for it?” and talked to family members in the business. The answer was, “Of course they did, but no one wants the liability if systems start crashing, so no one will step up and publicly say, ‘We are Y2K ready.’”
A simple approach can make a big difference.
One day, I may put together more posts about how to figure out what is true. For now, having three simple tests can make navigating the glut of data less daunting. It’s like planting your feet on solid ground in the middle of a stream, standing up, and realizing the flow of water is only knee-deep. You don’t have to be swept away.
- Check your favorite sources’ sources.
- Check your emotional reaction.
- Check the social pressure from your people.
As a side note, laziness will derail the first one, self-indulgence will sabotage the second, and fear of being ostracized can hinder the third. None of those have to keep you from detecting lies and fiction, though they could keep you from benefitting from the insight.
This is just one step in filtering toxic input because even something that is technically true can be unhealthy.
I will be posting more about that.
Suzanne Hagelin
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