A wise mentor told me that we should guard ourselves carefully from the people who rush to the microphones and TV cameras the moment news breaks. “Are they giving you confirmed facts or leading off with their first impressions?” he asked.
A few truisms about news:
Most news is the same things of history happening to different people.
It’s nigh impossible to know the whole story. The idea that multi-faceted events can be accurately described in a 4 min feature news segment or one newspaper article is preposterous, let alone a tweet or headline.
All sources of information operate from a perspective with some inherent bias. Then pile on the fact that people have self-interests in driving some narratives over others. Significant events always have competing narratives.
We filter information through our personal frames of reference and experience grids. We are often compelled to fill fact-gaps with stories and speculation.
We obsess over points in time events and systematically underweight the currents and trends of the decades which brought us to those points in time. This is easy to see when people blame whoever is “in charge” at the moment for events which unfolded after years of decisions and action & reaction by multiple stakeholders.
Anecdotes are genuine, but the plural of anecdotes is not data.
This blog isn’t going to address current events as a rule because I’ve grown to recognize the limits of my opinions and interpretations. I’m aiming for more timeless commentary and discussion.
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I’ve been guilty many times of offering my opinion and perspective before I’ve studied an issue. Sometimes I got away with spouting nonsense, and more often someone ‘corrected’ me.
The book of Job has some insights for us. Elihu is the fourth and youngest man to confront Job. He burned with passion and anger. Elihu’s criticism of Job are some the harshest in the story! It’s fascinating to me that at the end of the story God rebukes Job’s three friends and says nothing to Elihu! Does Elihu get a pass because of his youthfulness and lack of perspective? Perhaps. I doubt I’ll get a pass for “youthful ignorance” at my age!
I don’t hold myself ‘above’ the opinion-wonks. There are smart, savvy people worth learning from.
How can we best live in an opinion-saturated world, fueled by 24 hour news, further bolstered by a seemingly infinite number of podcasts and social media options?
Perhaps a good guideline is to give our focused attention to those who have studied a subject at least 100 hours in depth to understand it. I should probably only offer my opinion on subjects where I’ve read at least 10 books and crafted by view over 100+ hours of thinking, and still hold it loosely.
