Consider These Rules of the Road for Journalists and Media Readers
- 1. Accept that objectivity is a crock ; there is no such thing, so banish that false icon from your expectations(we all have different filters);. Go instead for opinionated, accurate, fair. ( We see not what is but what we are.)
- 2. Where to look— seek from many different sources
- 3. Diversity is a force multiplier for innovation and problem solving
- 4. Believing is seeing—not the other way around.
- 5. Why people do what they do: (from Robert Sapolsky—Behave)(Determined)what we do f ows from all that has happened to us)
- 6.Don’t be an authoritarian mind reader
- 7. Talk less, listen more
- 8. Truth seeking is about finding an intersection of sets—as in scientific method
- 9. Facts are temporary
- 10. Understand framing—if you want to discern what drives policy
- 11. Correlation does not prove cause and effect, though it sometimes suggests where you might look.
- 12.Establishh empathetic bond—I see you, I hear you -- to learn from others and BEFORE trying to convince
- 13. Learn to modulate your voice tones—no screeching, no preaching, no hectoring rejoinders in the course of inquiry
- 14.Slips from the ideal will happen. Accept it and yourself as someone who makes mistakes
- 15. Understand that and how automatic things happen under stress before they rise to consciousness.
- 16. Remember, we have outsmarted most of our predators from lions to bacteria. Today our most formidable natural enemy is ourselves. Nearly
- all of our biggest problems are caused or at least preventable by human choice.
- (Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them, p248)2013.
- 17. We have two different kinds of moral thinking:fast (using emotional automatic settings) and slow(using manual -mode reasoning )…When it’s Me vs. Us think fast. When its Us versus Them, think slow. Joshua Green, sic.)See also Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and forthcoming Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Kahneman.
- 18. Any system that depends on human vigilance will fail. Olivier Sibony in You’re About To Make A Terrible Mistake:How Biases Distort Decision-Making—What You Can do to Fight Them, ” 2019