oceanspace

I couldn’t find a copy of Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie at my local library, so I went looking for a relevant podcast as I often do. I found this interview, which I found to be a fascinating conversation. Apparently I wrote down this quote in a notebook lying around.

Just because something is digitally encoded, just because it’s in ones and zeroes, just because it’s pumped through an algorithm, doesn’t mean it’s objective, doesn’t mean that it’s become more true than anything else, and so we still have to leverage critical thinking skills of delineating between what we believe and what we don’t believe.

I was happy to rediscover it. It rings especially true these days when we spend so much time online, and every keystroke and milisecond of lingering on an image as you’re scrollning down a page is fed into an algorithm that may be reinforcing our cognitive biases. It reminded me of another interview I was listening to with John Maxwell, where he said

if it’s a blind spot, they’re not going to get better as they get older, they’re just gonna get a little more blind

And that’s what happens if you just keep reading content that just reinforces what you already know.