Take the Central Route

or take care in who you trust

There is no shortage of people eager to do your thinking for you. They’re sure you’re too stupid to come to the “right” conclusions. Because they’re so smart, it pains them when people disagree with them. If only everyone was as smart as they are, alas! They are not. Since they can’t make everyone smart (although those who hold this mindset have tried being the first to suggest and implement eugenics policies), and they can’t get away with killing the stupids, they’ve had to settle on pursuing another strategy: censorship. The censorship apparatus that was constructed to combat the destabilizing effect of the internet of the smarts hold on “the narrative” is withering under the assaults of extremist stupids like Mike Benz.¹ Additionally, censorship just doesn’t work that well, even when supercharged with AI. The extremist stupids find a way around the censorship, and see that they’re over the target the more they are suppressed by online “researchers” channeling government money into protecting their beloved globohomo narrative against “dangerous misinformation.”

Enter “Media Literacy”

Confronted with a rapidly expanding avalanche of popular discontent and skepticism from the stupids directed towards The Science, The Rules Based International Order, and other Sacred Truths, the smarts have become extremely anxious. After all, they are certain the world will surely come to an immediate and fiery end if the stupids prevail. It is clear to the smarts that the problem is simple: stupids having the temerity to think for themselves. There was all that propaganda about everyone going to college, and college was supposed to make sure the stupids couldn’t come to such heterodox conclusions about the important matters of the day. But college happened too late in development. Many stupids made it to college already habitualized to thinking for themselves. The smarts had to intervene earlier, and so they have with the advent of K-12 Media Literacy programs. Media Literacy trains every child in their formative years to forego using their own reasoning when evaluating information. This is an inversion of traditional liberal arts education which was meant not to teach you what to think, but teach you how to think. That turned out to not be reliable enough to ensure stupids get to the “right” conclusions though. With Media Literacy, students will now be taught how to choose someone else to think for them.

How Media Literacy Works

Lets start off with Media Literacy guru Mike Caulfield. He’s spent a lot of time and effort coming up with the best way to ensure stupids stay in their lane.

It's no secret that the web is full of a lot of  nonsense and a lot of that nonsense is relatively harmless, whether it's fake bakes on TikTok or  photoshopped images on Instagram. But some of it is deadly serious and that has never been more  apparent than now as we face this pandemic and try to sort through a mountain of information that has  dire consequences for the health of our families, our friends, and our community. I want to  show you techniques that you can use the sort fact from fiction on the web and everything  in between. Get to the truth of an issue in 30, 60, 90 seconds or less. The approach that I'm  going to show differs a little bit than what a lot of you have been taught.

If you've had  a media literacy course before there's a good chance you've been told that what you need to do is look deeply at the document or webpage or photo in front of you and think about whether  that is true or whether that is false. That is not our approach here. What we want you to  do is get off that page, get off that photo, go out onto the web and see what other people say about it.

And what I hope you'll find as we move forward is that while getting to absolute certainty is a never ending task, getting confident enough to make the sort  of decisions that you need to make is completely within your grasp in a skill that  you can learn in a very short amount of time.

In other words, listen dumbass, you’ve got shit for brains. You might be tempted to determine what you think about something. Big mistake, that takes way longer than 30, 60, or 90 seconds! Just go see what other people say about it. Smart people. You know, people like me. Just believe what they say about it. This isn’t being lazy and abdicating your responsibility as a citizen of an ostensibly free nation, it is employing a skill. Don’t you want to have a skill, dumbass?

If you’re not persuaded, don’t worry, your kids will be! They’ll have millions of taxpayer dollars and a captive audience (thanks mass forced schooling!) to make sure the stupids get the message and that it sticks. Really, its a win-win. The stupids don’t have time to think, and if they do, they’ll destroy the whole world by having kids, burning fossil fuels, and eating meat if we let them. It is much more efficient this way.

Central vs. Peripheral Processing

So with that satire out of the way I’ll get to the point of this article. When considering information there are two fundamental routes you can take, the central route, and the peripheral route. The central route is engaged when you apply your own reasoning to evaluate the information. This way takes longer, it consumes more cognitive resources, and it depends on your skill at reasoning. This is what liberal arts education used to be about, enhancing this skill. Like any skill, using it develops it, so even though it takes more time and effort, choosing the central route is probably worth it. It also has the distinct advantage of making the conclusions that you come to more stable.

The peripheral route is when we assess peripheral cues to assess information. These include the expertise or education of the source, or even just how good looking they are.

Rob Henderson’s latest has a lot of discussion on this and how it related to social status, definitely worth reading for some motivation to take the central route when you can (because taking the peripheral route leaves you open to manipulation):

Why Dumb Ideas Capture Smart and Successful People

Peripheral Route Heuristics

So take the central route if you can, but given the mass of information that we have to parse on a daily basis sometimes you’ll need to take the peripheral route. Since these people who want to do your thinking for you are trying to streamline the peripheral route to go through sources they control, alternative heuristics are helpful if you want to avoid being manipulated by people who hate you. Toward that end I like to seek out people who are well informed and morally aligned when I’m forced into the peripheral route.

When I say morally aligned, for me, that is referring to my assessment of their overall track record of hypocrisy and delusion. For individuals that fit this description, I don’t even need to share all of their values, as long as I can infer what their values are based on a consistent track record. I still typically use the central route, but when you curate independent sources this way and you compare their assessments to your own, you develop a more accurate model that can then be applied when time is limited and you need to action information faster than you can centrally process. Mindwar has people really demoralized about who they can trust, but I find it pretty easy to trust people who have long track records of consistency, then again, detecting inconsistency is a skill in and of itself, and it makes sense to always be monitoring for inconsistency and not content yourself to trust someone who has demonstrated inconsistency, especially if the best explanations for such are uncharitable.

The Third Option

Another option is to simply not take a position. We don’t have to take a position on everything. If there aren’t any purposeful actions you have queued that are dependent on taking a position on some particular information, then you can simply remain agnostic about it. Better to be agnostic in such circumstances then be wrong, which could come back to bite you if such a position does become relevant in the future.

1. Check out this short video breakdown Mike gives on Media Literacy

https://twitter.com/i/status/1727101742309937533