•Do not give money to people that you cannot confirm their existence and cause. (I would say avoid all unless you feel compelled to help out Wood/Powell legal case, etc.)
•No information is inherently bad or should be canceled, just never abandon your critical thinking skills or forget we live in the age of information warfare and deceit.
•Do not accept something as 100% truth unless you can confirm it yourself, take everything with the proper grain of salt.
•Cognitive dissonance has been the major tool of manipulation and is why people hang on to fake news. Observe your emotional desire to believe or dismiss information and remember this.
•Identify motives and incentives of those emitting information. What they gain/lose, why they may want to manipulate people, what effect they can create.
•Examine all possibilities and scenarios, who could have this information would it be logical for them to transmit these details what strategies can be deployed.
•Finally play devils advocate and all sides. Try to disprove what they say, or how would you refute somebody on the other side who believes the opposite. Try to fall on the side that makes the most sense and relies on the least emotion and ignorance. Give information time to be digested and engage in discussion with people in your life that are open minded and you respect for being objective(not yes men or people you enjoy because they are highly agreeable)
great advice fren. I'd tweak bullet #3
•Do not accept ANYTHING as 100% truth even when you feel certain it's 100%. We can't KNOW ANYTHING (Socrates - "I now know I'm intelligent because I know I know nothing") and take everything with the proper grain of salt.
we need to operate on our strong beliefs, but also recognize that these beliefs/opinions are never a certainty and could later be proven false
That is basically what I said. I will tweak it but I do not know what is different when I say confirm something I mean you can go outside and see if it is sunny or whatnot, nothing that you feel is certain.
I don't want to get too philosophical, but even when we walk outside and look up at a bright yellow thing above us do we KNOW it's the sun we are looking at?
don't get me wrong. I mean good luck to someone arguing it's NOT the sun. but all the same it's really not 100%. it's humbling to realize we don't know anything, but humility is one of the greatest qualities of this community and that a person can have
I agree with you there, at the same time we have to draw the line somewhere or else we are philosophically stuck at what is real and are we in a computer simulation and don't get too far.
The line is one of actionable knowledge. We act on what we believe to be true within reason, even if our belief is not 100%.
And I agree HeyDumDum, when we reach the point of 100% belief, we cease to be able to listen. It is our ability to listen, to suspend our beliefs and consider critically ANY evidence presented that is our greatest strength. If we lose the capacity to change our beliefs based on new evidence then we are under the same spell as those we call "Sleepers" (or Liberals (which is a misnomer) etc.).