Brain Food #409
To reach conclusions for ourselves
Daily Brain Food.
Before we dive into today’s Brain Food, you may be interested in reading We’re all going to die, my latest essay on Medium, containing some musings on Coronavirus, Freud, life, death and fear. It’s a longer read, so set some time aside for it (you can also save it using Pocket, one of my favourite apps), and do send me your thoughts.
Thoughts of the day
The Daily Courant, a name that will unsurprisingly not sound familiar to many, was the UK’s first daily newspaper, which entered circulation on this very day in 1702. Its creator, Elizabeth Mallet, said she wanted to include only foreign news, and wanted to believe that readers had “sense enough to make reflections for themselves.”
The way this premise developed is, naturally, complicated. Freedom of thought and freedom of press can have hugely positive but also negative outcomes. Today, there are twelve daily newspapers in circulation in the UK, and over 1,200 in the US, though these only include the printed format - maintaining a sense of quality and truthfulness, springing from a centralised source, is near impossible. The rise of social ‘media’ has not just altered the way we communicate news, but also how news sources attempt to share what they consider to be ‘newsworthy’ for the sake of increased traffic.
And, of course, we must add our own interactions with news to the mix: do we read things to learn something new, or to confirm something we already think we know? How often do we choose what we read to satisfy our own fallacies? It may be worth reading something we do not believe in, from time to time; we might be convinced otherwise, or at least feel more reassured about our choices.
Availability bias dictates that our view of the world will be biased by information we have readily available. It is always important to think about what we don’t know, or even what the person writing the news article we are reading does not know. Having sense enough to reach conclusions for and by ourselves is crucial, but even more crucial is remembering that, as Voltaire remarked, “common sense is not so common.”
