I’m interested in everyday applications like noticing bias in commercial media as well as word-of-mouth and social media. Are there any principles or methods you know of that you’d consider especially important?

I’m also interested in any recommendations for online training.

Edit: Wow! Since there are some great suggestions in the comments, I'd like to summarise them here:

• Primary sources and secondary sources (fefellama)
• Engagement (BeanBurrito)
• Under The Influence by Terry O'Reilly [podcast] (chocobean)
• Influence, marketing, motivation, bias, dark patterns, corruption, phrasing and choice of words (chocobean)
• Multiple sources. Verbalise your thought process / question yourself (hobofarmer)
• Advanced Placement English. Ethos, pathos, logos (Wisix)
• Learning how to hold and study concepts without internalizing them. Not becoming emotionally dependent on “being right”. (bet)
• Flaws in perception and processing. The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef: "the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were" (Landhund)
• Fact checking, exercises such as mock trials (chizcurl)
• Not assuming that critical thinking transfers across domains (daywalker)
• Falsifiability, scientific psychology, psychological bias, cognition / emotion / behaviour (daywalker)
• 'Very Short Introductions' series by Oxford Press (daywalker)
• Many ways to conceptualise "critical thinking". Appreciating the humanity of other people. (mieum)
• Self reflection and acknowledgement of diversity (mieum)
• The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science [book] (gaywallet)
• Being Wrong: Adventures on the Margin of Error [book] (boxer_dogs_dance)
• Be curious and ask questions (Markpelly)
• Empathy facilitates understanding and tempers reactivity (Aerrol)
• Nobel disease or Nobelitis (saturnV)

I am not really someone who is well-versed in history, I never paid attention in high school, I couldn't wait to GTFO. I know what I know based solely on podcasts/debates/lectures I find on YouTube and what Hollywood brings to my attention.

from my own knowledge, periods of social change (at least in North America):

• the civil rights movement
• women's suffrage movement
• civil war (given it was fought to a great deal to end slavery)

when it comes to social changes in history that is not based in North America, I know of only the broad strokes and none of the specifics, like I know the arrival of the printing press lead to a great deal of struggle in the same way that the arrival of social media has created a struggle, just the balance of power has changed.

I also know that France went through a French Revolution that played a big part of its current political landscape and its secular status quo.

However, something I have found interesting is that within the span of <10 years, we are experiencing a reckoning on several different fronts:

• MeToo movement have rise to a long-needed discussion of sexual harassment and just a general gender reckoning in other ways too
• the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests gave rise to a global awareness that race-related issues
• the Hamas attack on Israel has certainly pushed the discussion of Israel-Palestine to the forefront. Before the attack, I could not tell you the difference between Erdoğan and Netanyahu. That's obviously no longer the case.

But it makes me wonder if this is unprecedented in human history that so many different issues of social change are being pushed to the forefront in very quick succession of each other or this is a repeat, that it's common for a civilization that experiences one changing in the social norm, to start experiencing other social changes cause they are always in the mindset or something?

I've been mulling over this for some time. I'm what you'd call a politically or ideologically motivated person, as it contains topics close to my heart and I'm trying to do my best about them. However, I mostly don't personally follow "the news". I still hear or read things due to my friends and family, or because of places I browse like Tildes. But even here, I filter out most news topics.

Part of this is due to the health problems I have, as they leave little mental energy to spend on stuff, and I'd much rather spend that energy to build something rather than get demoralized. So, what I do instead is to check out specific topics I care more about, and possibly academic articles.

With this being said, I've been observing people around me and how they interact with the news. I'm trying to assess how much following the news regularly impact their political activity. I mean contributing to some sort of political goal. Based on my observations, I'm not convinced that regular consumption of news, in the form of visiting a news website (or several), is what is presented to be.

So, I decided to flex my ideological analysis muscles a little. Here's a rough sketch of my thoughts on the ideology of being a news outlet, whether it's a giant corporation or a single person.

I think there are two levels to the ideology of being a news outlet.

1) The News System

A) How to Market Yourself

1. You are the most important source of knowledge about the topic you choose. This most often includes a city, country, continent, a political concept like "the west", or the world in general.
2. You are the objective source of knowledge on this topic.
3. Consuming news regularly is the responsibility of every citizen. Thus, they should buy your products or visit your website. Doing otherwise is shirking one's duty, and it's morally reprehensible. It's equal to being ignorant.

With this level, you establish yourself as the epistemological source of news about the topic, and you attach moral feelings of duty, guilt, shame, etc. to consuming your product. However, it's also a wider ideology. You don't only sell your news, you sell the news. That means you're also marketing the idea of news to people. This is how you establish the moral case, that is vital to selling your product. It's also important for prestige, which shouldn't be underestimated. There is not only an economic motivation but also a social motivation to selling the idea of news, presenting yourself as a bringer of truths.

B) How to Keep Them in the Loop

1. Humans are problem-fixers, because ignoring problems would mean they or their loved ones could suffer from them in the future. So, they are emotionally motivated to seek and try to fix problems. So, if you present them a problem, they will pay attention to it.
2. Cities, countries, continents, etc. are vast. There are always problems, no matter how big or small. You can always report on them.
3. If you face with the criticism of getting too small on scale, you can say you are just putting a human face on a widespread problem.

By utilizing the points above, you can ensure that you are always selling your product. You also ensure that you are feeling like you are contributing to the world, by "bringing the news to people". This way, you ensure both your financial success and your moral standing, your sense of meaning.

2) The Problems

The problem with the system created by the approach above is several-fold, and it doesn't depend on the factuality of the news being reported.

1. This system ensures there is always bad-news to be reported every single day, possibly even every single waking hour.
2. The constant source of bad-news demoralizes people, and quite possibly affects their mental health. A cursory look at Google Scholar with the keywords "doomscrolling mental health" is enough to show that this is suspected by the psychological literature too.
3. This stream of bad-news alters a person's perception of city, country, world.

For example, if you look at the subreddit for a city, quite often you'll see it filled with news of crimes and such, with people in the comments lamenting or raging about it. But the daily life in such cities is very rarely one of being riddled with crime.

Another example is USA citizens' perception of crime. "The violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%)." However, more and more people in USA think crime is getting worse. I suspect the news-cycle bears a big portion of the blame.

To drive the point home, I suspect this constant stream of bad-news might be feeding into conservatism, as "a meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r = .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat."

So, there is enough reason to suspect that constant stream of bad-news, which should elevate people's feelings of uncertainty and threat, should be feeding into conservatism.

3) Solution?

This is an open-ended topic, and I'm not claiming to have solved a very complex topic in a few hundred words. However, one thing that I found to work is limiting and choosing what I consume. By the ways I mentioned, I limit what I see and I try to focus more on topics I care more about.

There is support from the literature too, that suggests partial news avoidance can benefit mental health and well-being (more on the topic can be found on Google Scholar with "news avoidance mental health").

Obviously, following news isn't a black or white situation, and for moderation there is no single size that fits all. But I think it would be better to keep in mind that news outlets benefit both financially and socially from establishing their regular consumption as a moral principle. Honestly, I think constructing a good understanding of ideology and history is more important than that, as it provides a more solid base to judge things from, but that's another day's topic.

I've found error theory, emotivism, etc. quite compelling, but I noticed that most philosophers are moral realists, though PhilPapers doesn't ask specifically about moral objectivism. As a non-philosopher, I feel that there may be considerations that I haven't come across. The SEP entry seems a bit lacking to me considering it's just a supplement to the entry on moral anti-realism, and there doesn't seem to be an IEP entry specifically focused on moral objectivism, just a tiny section in the entry on moral realism.

What is Poverty Point in short?

Emphasis in the text below is mine.

In modern-day Louisiana there is a place with the dispiriting name of Poverty Point. Here you can still see the remains of massive earthworks erected by Native Americans around 1600 BC. With its plush green lawns and well-trained coppices, today the site looks like something halfway between a wildlife management area and a golf club. Grass-covered mounds and ridges rise neatly from carefully tended meadows, forming concentric rings which suddenly vanish where the Bayou Macon has eroded them away (bayou being derived, via Louisiana French, from the Choctaw word bayuk: marshy rivulets spreading out from the main channel of the Mississippi). Despite nature’s best efforts to obliterate these earthworks, and early European settlers’ best efforts to deny their obvious significance (perhaps these were the dwellings of an ancient race of giants, they conjectured, or one of the lost tribes of Israel?), they endure: evidence for an ancient civilization of the Lower Mississippi and testimony to the scale of its accomplishments.

Archaeologists believe these structures at Poverty Point formed a monumental precinct that once extended over 200 hectares, flanked by two enormous earthen mounds (the so-called Motley and Lower Jackson Mounds) which lie respectively north and south. To clarify what this means, it’s worth noting that the first Eurasian cities – early centres of civic life like Uruk in southern Iraq, or Harappa in the Punjab – began as settlements of roughly 200 hectares in total. Which is to say that their entire layout could fit quite comfortably within the ceremonial precinct of Poverty Point. (...) People and resources came to Poverty Point from hundreds of miles away, as far north as the Great Lakes and from the Gulf of Mexico to the south.

(...)

Today, Poverty Point is a National Park and Monument and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Despite these designations of international importance, its implications for world history have hardly begun to be explored. A hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state, Poverty Point makes the Anatolian complex of Göbekli Tepe look like little more than a ‘potbelly hill’ (which is, in fact, what ‘Göbekli Tepe’ means in Turkish). Yet outside a small community of academic specialists, and of course local residents and visitors, very few people have heard of it.

(...)

Published in 2004, this remarkable discovery by John E. Clark, an archaeologist and authority on the pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica, has been greeted by the scholarly community with responses ranging from lukewarm acceptance to plain disbelief, although nobody appears to have actually refuted it. Many prefer simply to ignore it. Clark himself seems surprised by his results.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK.

A more detailed explanation is given at the end of this post.

Why is it important?

The traditional historical or archaeological understanding of political organization of society separates societies into four categories: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states (1, 2, 3, 4). It proposes that as human society became more complex, its hierarchies became more pronounced, that this is inevitable. As an extension of this, it treats the least hierarchical, or in other words "most egalitarian" form of society, hunter-gatherers (foragers), as lacking any complex form of societal organization or achivement.

This narrative also ties the rise of the state to invention of agriculture, thus treats pre-agriculture societies as lacking complex structures and organizations.

Numerous examples contradict this quasi-social Darwinist hypothesis, such as Göbekli Tepe, which was -for its time- a gigantic settlement created by hunter-gatherers, and they are almost never heard of. In this way, Poverty Point, despite being an even more important finding that defy the traditional narratives about human history, is heard of even less.

Maybe even more importantly, this hypothesis is used to justify the existence of existing hierarchies, such as capitalism or stratified societies. The Better Angels of Our Nature by the famous pro-capitalist ideologue Steven Pinker, for example, uses this argument. This book had a very wide reach, and was presented by Bill Gates as "one of the most important books I’ve read—not just this year, but ever."

Why is it ignored?

Let’s first ask why even some experts apparently find it so difficult to shake off the idea of the carefree, idle forager band; and the twin assumption that ‘civilization’ properly so called – towns, specialized craftspeople, specialists in esoteric knowledge – would be impossible without agriculture. Why would anyone continue to write history as if places like Poverty Point could never have existed? (...) The real answer, we suggest, has more to do with the legacy of European colonial expansion; and in particular its impact on both indigenous and European systems of thought, especially with regard to the expression of rights of property in land.

Here it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune already to be living in territories coveted by European settlers. This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth-century jurists came to call the ‘Agricultural Argument’, a principle which has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations.

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working. The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labour’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke’s disciples, didn’t do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum of effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts.’ In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything from outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvée labour and debt peonage.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK.

There is one more reason I can think of. For clarification, I haven't progressed into the cited book much further than this point, so I don't know if they mention this later, however, justifying hierarchies based on a narrative of "historical progress" has a more general reason than the "agricultural argument" made by colonialists: it works to justify pretty much any existing hierarchy. Capitalism, nation-states, authoritarianism, you name it—all of it can be justified by saying this is the price we pay for complex societies (and progress), that there is no other way unless we want to give up most of what we have. In fact, Pinker does exactly this for capitalism (and neoliberalism). So I very much suspect this ideological approach plays a role in even experts overlooking such an obviously important finding.

The book I'm using as the source for this post, The Dawn of Everything, is written by two archaeologists. It's a great book I recommend to anyone. It turns the traditional understanding of history and pre-history, especially about "equality", upside down. It shows enough evidence to poke so many and giant holes in the frameworks that approach history as if it's linear or is one of "progress", and I've only read 1/3 of it yet. Poverty Point is just one of many examples.

The traitor, the betrayer is the most wretched thing in mythos. Whether this mythos be religious or secular, from west or east, from north or south, this creature begets only the harshest response. Loyalty, it is said, is not to be trifled with. Even more importantly, it is not to be thrown away, or you will face our wrath.

In the current political landscape, this often means being loyal to your nation-state. However, nation-states are built on blood, genocide, and betrayal of justice. They are built on the mounds of the poor slain ones. Their souls yearn for justice, unable to achieve any peace, even in void—from beyond the grave their tortured spirits yearn for this villainy to be corrected. Why? Because this is not only the nation-state's legacy but also its present, for it carries the wind of that original sin. Like a ghost that still sees its killer continue to murder, they are unable to rest, and what was done to them still to this day haunt the nation-states. There is no single nation-state that doesn't guard this foundation, that doesn't dominate the unwanted ones. Being loyal to a nation-state means being part of this sin.

Most people embrace this, to varying degrees, but in the end all of them partake in the blood rituals. Even the few people who are aware of the original sin, they still hold onto that feeling of loyalty. After all, humans are social, and you grew up with these people. They are yours, are they not? These bloodthirsty lunatics—you see the human in them.

A piercing gaze reveals: what you feel is not compassion, not understanding that humans are complex -these are the excuses you tell yourself- but simply fear. You fear being rejected, being isolated, being an outcast, being an enemy. You fear being the traitor, that wretched one, the ultimate evil. Thus, the tyrants manage to bind you with fear and the yoke of morality, and you continue to escape confronting the evil of the land.

What is required is to forego any notion of loyalty to the bloodied soil's inhabitants. One should become a betrayer to their loved ones, for it is the only way to fight the original sin. Becoming that ultimate evil, that darkness, that splinter that won't go away, that fight-starter, that menace, that disgrace—it is the only path out of this pit, the only way to vanquish the thirsting gods of the nation-state.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household."

• Matthew 10:34-36

I don't follow politics anymore.

I wasn't always like this. I used to be a good liberal; I went to demonstrations, paid close attention to every SCOTUS decision, kept up with everything that went to shit during the first Trump presidency, etc. I wrote my representative about things that still needed to be undone. I would feel anxious regarding the state of the future. I followed the day-to-day of the Mueller investigation. I joined a small group that read political theory and philosophy. I'd try eagerly to defend my values to friends, family, and coworkers. I wanted to do my part to make this world a better place!

I learned about historical materialism, and this tracked with me in a way liberal idealism never did. The US isn't this pinnacle, this culmination of moral progress humanity achieved, but like every society that came before it a small ruling class that exploits a larger group. Liberal democracy itself is a product of changing material conditions. And like every other exploited class before me, I held to the ideology of my society (liberalism) and I believed my exploitation was just. I used to dismiss this framing as hippie nonsense, but it turns out this is a bedrock for much current sociology. Slowly, this plus Trump plus COVID broke me from trying to reason with conservatives or care about changing minds.

I don't know what the solution to anything is. I doubt that materialism is true, though I still think the framing is useful. I still vote, but as a basic bit of harm reduction. I no longer feel invested in seeing the US succeed as a bastion of liberal democracy. I have no pride in liberal accomplishments and feel no surprise in reactionary successes. I don't care that Trump was indicted. I wasn't shocked that Roe was overturn. I can't do anything about the Chevron decision. I would've lost it a few years ago, but today I just don't care. That's probably what conservatives want, and I don't care about that either.

Instead of following politics or reading theory, I read whatever philosophy I want. Instead of keeping up with debates, I focus on my hobbies and hanging out with friends. My apathy isn't due to being unaffected by modern politics, it very much is, but I've accepted my lot in life, the way I assume everyone of every society preceding mine has done. I feel liberated from a struggle I rarely if ever got to be a participant in. And, you know what, I'm accomplishing just about as much as I was before. I didn't realize it, but I've been checked out for a long time now, and I wonder if others feel the same.