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Swallowed by junk

Swallowed by junk
Too much to read. Too long. Too biased. Too inaccurate.
Because most news travels through the internet, social sites like TikTok or (Twitter)X or Facebook are often important information sources. And yup, this tends to reduce stories to outrageous performative bites.1

This media circus can be fun to read in the same way that Monty Python is fun to watch. But, again like Monty Python, it should not be the only media you consume.

Do you know many people who are satisfied with today's news coverage? We sure don't.

Neither does Pew Research.2 Oddly, in a society with near-instant access to vast amounts of knowledge, finding relevant facts can be more than a little hard.

Issues can seem too big and too confusing. Legacy media often ask too much from modern customers with low TLDR (Too Long, Didn't Read) thresholds. The pace of the online environment doesn't encourage people to spend substantial chunks of their "reading budgets" on big, expansive, in-depth articles, whether online or onpaper. Such treatments don't fit with the fast-moving, interrupt-driven, online information ecology. Plenty of these articles are filled with facts, but — increasingly — we don't have the patience to find them.

Because long-form media are often difficult, many readers turn instead to high-dopamine3 social media feeds, to the quotable, to the short-lived. Assertions are easy to make, proof is scarce, references and backgrounders and explainers are nowhere to be seen. Nuance is roadkill, smashed flat by outrage-fueled algorithms that roar down the information superhighway4.

And no matter which style of media you consume, the sheer volume of misinformation, disinformation, distortions, and outright lies is overwhelming.

But for every news story, for every event, for every issue, somewhere out there in an “information oubliette”—a spot narrow in focus and deep in empirical and verifiable knowledge—are real objective facts, supported by good research, careful reporting, and bias-free analysis.

You might notice we haven't used the word "truth" at all so far. The traditional philosophical understanding of truth has been broadened — if not challenged — by current thinking, where "my personal truth" is meant to be "the world as seen through my eyes". Truth — as a phrase — has shifted from objective reality to subjective reality.

Yes, of course. Background, heritage, emotion, perspective, and passion all influence how someone views the world. They always have.

Personal truths saturate our media precisely because they can be so useful. They have a genuine place as they help society arc towards a broader, more human morality.

But not only do we at Sweet Lightning not want to talk about truth, we don't even want to have an opinion about it. If we do talk about it, we've made a mistake. Tell us.

Sweet Lightning tries to shed light on important issues by going narrow and deep, by doing what we can to discover, document, explain, and summarize facts that are singularly important. Our hope — in an era of short, subjective, emotionally-charged assertions — is that actual facts can help you think more deeply and carefully about ... anything that is important. (And especially about our climate, which tends to be where Sweet Lightning usually focuses.)

We often set aside singular facts in callouts. If you are short on time, just read the stuff in boxes. We promise everything in a box is sourced and fact-checked.

How we hope to write

We're a small newsletter, with only two of us trying to squeeze in all the work between the busy activities of normal lives.

We don't have the near-endless resources of a big media organization, but because our goal is to try to bring forward illuminating facts that will help with clear thinking, we have to be very careful about ... facts.

We work within a "factful framework" where:

  1. Facts are at the core of the work flow: During the writing process, the author gathers a collection of facts we hope will be useful, and writes an article around those facts.
  2. Fact checks are automated: We use AIs to check all the facts in every article. We don't accept any AI assertions at face value, but instead use the AI as a tool to find external sources of peer-reviewed articles, validated statistics, and long-standing public domain knowledge. So we use AIs to check our facts, and then validate the claims of the AIs.
  3. Criticism drives collaboration: As we write articles, we constantly pass them back and forth to see if a skeptical human eye can detect errors.
  4. Failure tests are important: We try to find articles by experts (or expert systems) that might prove anything in the article to be wrong. If we find this, we'll either change the article or point to an open issue.
  5. Transparency and citations are gatekeepers: We'll never say "Many people believe...." Instead, whenever we can we'll show you the sources for the facts we report so you can read the original assertions for yourself and make up your own mind. If we cannot find the facts, we don't print the story.

How we hope to read

Our writing workflow can be adapted just a little bit to give a “reading workflow”. We use it and like it. We bet you will too:

  1. Notice facts that are supported by real-world data outside the article. Ask if assertions are facts or opinion.
  2. Use AI to fact-check what you read (not forgetting that AI lies all the time).
  3. Talk to other people about what you read … and try to use the conversation to critique it.
  4. Try to prove every assertion wrong. If you can’t, then maybe … just maybe … it is right. Use experts to help.
  5. Discover the original sources and examine them critically.

Yeah, this is a lot of work. But it's easier than the work to repair all the damage that comes from being drawn into messy beliefs at the bottom of a bucket of conspiracy swill.

All forms of media exist either to turn you into a product or to influence your behaviour. This should at least make you wary. Sometimes it should make you angry. Don’t let what you read change your thinking casually and easily. Fight to keep the contents of your mind accurate.

Rage against the obscuring of the light.

⚡️

  1. “The One Simple Change That Will Improve Your Media Diet in 2024.” Accessed November 1, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240207-the-one-simple-change-that-will-improve-your-media-diet-in-2024.
  2. Jurkowitz, Elisa Shearer, Michael Lipka, Sarah Naseer, Emily Tomasik and Mark. “Americans’ Views of 2024 Election News.” Pew Research Center (blog), October 10, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/10/10/americans-views-of-2024-election-news/.
  3. Firth, Joseph, John Torous, Brendon Stubbs, Josh A. Firth, Genevieve Z. Steiner, Lee Smith, Mario Alvarez‐Jimenez, et al. “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition.” World Psychiatry 18, no. 2 (June 2019): 119–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20617.
  4. Monash Lens. “Facebook and the Unconscionability of Outrage Algorithms,” May 30, 2022. https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/05/30/1384596?slug=facebook-and-the-unconscionability-of-outrage-algorithms.