Being on social media these days, you can’t help but notice unproductive ideas just floating around. Because they are up for grabs, people who never thought about thinking through whatever they consume from the media becomes vulnerable to come up with absurd and unproductive reasoning.
The author of Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America calls this absurd and unproductive reasoning as loserthink.
Loserthink isn’t about being dumb, and it isn’t about being underinformed. Loserthink is about unproductive ways of thinking.
Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
And I think that loserthink is not only ruining America. It destroys every country with people having unproductive ways of thinking.
I recommend that you read the book, and learn how to spot and avoid loserthink.
There are underlying causes for loserthink, and it appears that fake news is like the wood to the fire.
Stories without proper context are a dangerous type of fake news, and often the hardest to spot.
Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
From the book, here’s how to filter potential fake news:
1. Four-Point Check: News that is true will generally be reported the same on right-leaning news sites Fox News and Breitbart, as well as on left-leaning CNN and MSNBC. If they all say a hurricane is heading your way, pack your bags. If only the right-leaning news sites or only the left-leaning news outlets report something as fact, it probably isn’t.
2. Team Bias: The “side” that is out of power is more likely to generate fake news. When President Obama was in office, Fox News told you he was destroying the country in a thousand ways. CNN was a bit more balanced about President Obama, and more likely to talk of his accomplishments. Under President Trump, CNN pivoted to nonstop negativity about Trump’s performance, and Fox News became more of a cheerleader. The news outlet whose political side is out of power does the most fearmongering because that’s what sells to the viewers. The side that has its preferred president in power has the advantage of being able to point to some accomplishments over time, even if they have to exaggerate to do so.
3. Mind Reading: Look for signs that news pundits are reading the minds of politicians to find problems. That usually means things are not as bad as the headlines suggest. The news business needs a full pipeline of news — preferably the bad kind — to feed their business model. If all they can find to complain about is their opinion about the unspoken thoughts of strangers, the world is in a good place.
4. Doom Predictions: Look for signs that the reported bad news is really a prediction of doom from someone who is a political partisan. Predictions of doom from cheerleaders for one team or another are almost always exaggerated.
5. Manufactured Outrages: Look for signs that pundits are actively misinterpreting, or taking out of context, someone’s comments that would have been no big scandal without the devious sleight of hand.
6. Absurdity: If you see news that is so absurd it is literally unbelievable, that’s usually because it isn’t true. The old saying in news business is that a dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is. It would be highly unusual for a man to bite a dog, but one could imagine it happening in our crazy world. So that doesn’t qualify as absurd, just unlikely, The absurd case would be a story about a pet cemetery located near a nuclear waste site that reanimated a dead dog that went on to bite someone.
7. Fog of War: For breaking news, don’t believe the first quotes you hear, the body counts, the implications for the future, whose fault it is, or much else about the story until some of the noise settles down. Experience tells us that the initial reports on most things are inaccurate.
Why should you care about fake news? Check out this resource.
jessa 