Where the Hell is Walter Cronkite?

This week Mark Manson wrote a few paragraphs I wish I had written. Since I didn’t, here is the guts of Mark’s Monday blog post “Entertaining ideas without accepting them.”

How often do we remember that there is a difference between evidence and truth. Less and less. And social media and cable TV do not help us with this process.

So often, I shake my head and ask: Where the hell is Walter Cronkite???

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Entertaining Ideas without Accepting Them

(excerpt) by Mark Manson

Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I would like to take a moment and establish some guiding principles for this newsletter going forward, and I’ll explain why below:

• Just because I write about something does not mean that I necessarily 100% believe it or even think you should believe it. That may freak you out. You may say, “Well, why (…) am I subscribed to this thing then?” But the goal of this newsletter isn’t to believe—it’s to think. It’s to become comfortable with thinking without My guiding principle when determining what to write about is what’s interesting, not necessarily what is Capital-T “True.” There is a famous (fake) Aristotle quote that says, “The mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it.” The goal here is to be an educated mind.
  
  
• (Any) scientific studies presented in this newsletter are evidence, not Just because there is evidence for something doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true. Just because that evidence is sometimes flawed or limited does not necessarily mean that it’s not true. Evidence of something simply means that that something is more likely, and occasionally, far more likely.
  
  
• Sometimes seemingly contradictory things can both be correct. Police brutality can be declining and it can still be a major problem in the United States. Education can be getting worse despite the fact that young people of each generation continue to end up more educated. Smartphones can be both good and bad for our mental health. Political causes can be good even if the people who lead them are corrupt morons. If there is any enemy of this newsletter, it is “all or nothing” thinking (…).

I also believe it’s the nuance of the above items that the internet does terribly. (…) Evidence gets misrepresented as fact and theories get misrepresented as evidence. People seem unable to sit with two opposing ideas long enough to see how they could fit together.

I bring all this up simply because I find that I get dozens of frustrated or even angry replies each week that slip into the three categories above. People assume that because I share some information, I must be a proponent of that political cause or ideology. People assume that because a study I share is limited, it must be false and I must be wrong. And sometimes people freak out and say, “Well, three weeks ago you said X, this week you’re saying the opposite of X — which is it, Mark, huh?”

To which I reply, “Both?”

Going forward, I may occasionally remind you of these principles, (…) partly for your sake because we all so easily forget, myself included. (This blog is where we can) consider contradictory and paradoxical ideas without necessarily having to settle on them being true or untrue. Because the point isn’t to always be right or wrong… it’s to gain an understanding. Because the world is… weird and confusing and the moment we stop challenging our own thinking is the moment everything gets worse.

Okay, that’s enough of that…