Experienced homemakers know that a trip to the supermarket hits the wallet much less hard if you make a shopping list beforehand and stick to it.
If you suddenly feel like buying something else, that “something” is added to the next shopping list, and the decision to purchase it is made before the next trip to the store.
In fact, this is a question of awareness. The state of awareness requires a consumption of mental resources. There’s a direct analogy with muscles—if you tire them out, they stop working. Similarly, awareness can shut down in people under stress, in response to bad news, or when intoxicated. We can’t be aware all the time. Simply spending our awareness on “not buying chips” can lead us into a trap called, hmm… “smoked sprats.” Being constantly aware is exhausting for the brain, and the best thing we can do is to avoid situations where awareness is needed. Going shopping? That’s fine, but do it on a full stomach and with a shopping list.
We cannot constantly ignore the onslaught of lies. Whether it’s a propagandist or a fighter against falsehoods, someone will always bring us the next piece of misinformation. We are all under constant attack, and if you let your guard down for even a moment, you can find yourself caught in the sticky and suffocating grip of an alternate reality. A more comfortable one, requiring less struggle and clearly among “your own.” What will help you cross over to the “dark side of the Force”? Everything that tires your consciousness. The worse your life is, the more fluff you’ll have in your head. The more information of questionable value surrounds you, supposedly requiring analysis, the more it will seep in and settle in your brain, and so on.
We, while fighting against one wave of propaganda, open our minds to another. And, lo and behold, for some reason we march to vote in the elections for a questionable candidate who, for the first time in history, is winning in just one round, supposedly just because we need to unite, yeah, all as one.
The experiment with the fire hydrant was first conducted in the sixties and has been repeated several times since then. We will show two groups of people a blurred image of a fire hydrant. It should be blurred enough that the object cannot be recognized.
For one group of people, we will gradually increase the resolution in ten steps. For the other group, we will do it more quickly, in five steps. We will stop when both groups have a picture of the same clarity in front of them and ask what they see. The group that experienced fewer intermediate steps will recognize the hydrant in the picture more quickly.
The moral? The more information you provide to a person, the more hypotheses they will come up with along the way, and the worse the outcome will be. They encounter more random noise and start confusing it with actual information.
(Nassim Taleb)
To avoid tempting ourselves and exploiting our awareness, we simply need to follow some basic guidelines when “purchasing” information. After all, by consuming information, we pay for it with our time, our attention, and the neurons in our brains.
What should be done?
A. Instantly close any news, articles, or videos that present emotions alongside information or use emotionally charged terms. Try to check whether the text is designed to evoke emotions; would it read the same if, for example, you replaced the word “Ukraine” with “Mexico”? Would you still want to share it afterward? Ignore any materials where the author engages the reader with questions or nudges them toward conclusions.
B. Don’t be swayed by any publications that use the phrase “anonymous source” or include placeholder words in the text that disguise its bias or fabrication. Always ask yourself while reading: could this be a fabrication, a one-off, non-systemic fact, or just speculation?
Don’t waste your time on any publications that use the conditional mood “if only…” or those that discuss the future or interpret the past. If you want a conscious interpretation of the past, go to the library. Everything we read unconsciously, everything we read not because we wanted to before sitting down at the computer, is just junk. Think back over the past few years—how much of the material you’ve read online really stuck with you? Not much? Then you were wasting your time reading it.
It’s essential to completely ignore materials that claim someone said or wrote something. If you’re interested in who said or wrote what, find the original source and listen or read it yourself from start to finish, along with the context. When someone tries to summarize what was said, they inevitably add their own interpretation and take it out of context. We all seem to know that Ahmadinejad threatened to wipe Israel off the map. However, not only is this taken out of context, but it is also emotionally colored. News snippets with interpretations of what was said are very convenient for propaganda operators because they a) are easily consumed by a “non-critical” audience and b) provoke a flurry of reactions and reposts. refutations at “critical.” There will be spoons, but the aftertaste…
D. It is also worth ignoring all materials (and reposts) that rely on new memes and terms, the meanings and emotional weight of which have only recently been formed. Words like “junta,” “Banderite,” “rashist,” “vatnik,” and “cyborg” are examples of this. If you remember or take the time to dig a little, you’ll find that the word “cyborg” became a meme after… ta-da… a pompous but misleading article about “our heroes” (another example of an emotionally charged phrase) that was pleasant to read and later debunked, but we forgot about it because it was uncomfortable.
May the Force be with you!