How to understand politics (or anything else) Contents

Posted 30 June 2024

Part 1: Consume lots of information (written 2021 (?))

When I was in middle school and just starting to get into following politics / current events, I used to wonder how people knew enough to generate the hypotheses and narratives they did, and to make predictions about the future. But, a year or two ago, I had a friend ask me how I was so “smart” (...that sounds braggy), and how I was so knowledgeable about politics. I realized that, over the years (about 3, to be more specific), I’ve actually become what I wanted to become. I not only hold beliefs but also am able to connect them to each other and make cogent (if dubious) arguments, predictions about the future, and narratives and hypotheses just like I had wanted to years earlier.

During those intervening years, I hadn’t intentionally tried to develop my hypothesizing skills or anything like that. All I did was consume news articles (and some books). I consumed news articles day and night. I read the CNN daily briefing (!) in the morning when I ate breakfast. I even read news articles during class. While not all of these choices are advisable, it was the sheer quantity of input that I was able to “train” myself on that helped me to gain the facilities I have now, and the connections I made. The first time I saw an article about a topic, it would be interesting but I would have no context for it. But the next time I saw a topic mentioned, I’d be able to make a connection. Over time, I’d see the same issues pop up over and over again—e.g., intellectual property and pharmaceutical drug patents would appear in different cases; also, the first time I read about TANF and AFDC, I had no context, but the second and third times I saw it, I remembered having read it before and was able to eventually make a web of connections. (If you read the same sources (e.g., blogs, particular writers or beats) frequently enough, they tend to cover the same topics—e.g., I developed opinions on markets, artificial monopolies, etc. by reading articles from Slate Star Codex, which covers those topics frequently. The risk here is that you’ll develop bias from reading too much from a single source.)

While I’m now past the stage of consuming lots of news semi-naively, I think this was a useful phase that developed my intellectual faculties. Similarly to actually doing things, my findings from this are that practice makes perfect and consuming a large amount of material is, at least in some cases, a good way to develop skills in an area. So my recommendation to those who want to be “smart”, and to have some capacity for political speculation, is to absorb information, and to absorb lots of it.

(I initially got into politics around the time of the 2016 election, and recall first reading articles from, like, Mashable, but also sensible outlets like CNN and WaPo and the New Yorker, trivial articles making fun of Donald Trump and his idiosyncrasies. That was one thing that was interesting at the time, and there’s probably space for that kind of articles if they’re a pipeline into real policy wonkery, although of course some people get stuck there and never advance. While this probably made my epistemics worse in the short run, I think I’ve probably recovered and grown past that. But another huge influence on my news consumption was my middle school language arts teacher, who told me I might like reading The Atlantic, and was right! I spent some of 8th grade, and the summer after it, reading Atlantic articles and in the summer I paired them with online Honors Algebra 2 for gifted kids, novelwriting, and learning Esperanto on Duolingo, thus living up to the test I’d had to take to prove myself “talented”.)

Addendum for publication (10 June 2024)

More recently, I’ve gotten into aviation, and I’ve undertaken basically the same process as I did for politics / current events (even down to consuming lots of information about the subject of interest when I should’ve been doing schoolwork...). In this case, I’ve been watching lots of YouTube videos of ATC exchanges (again, an easy entry point is the funny videos (and YouTube Shorts, even, for better or worse!) of Kennedy Steve (the KJFK controller known for entertaining radio comms) and others; like with current events, I rapidly descended into learning how to read back instructions and visualizing headings in my head and finding out what all those prowords mean)—then going over to live ATC radio—reading Wikipedia articles on aviation accidents/incidents and thus NTSB reports (item 14 in the NTSB docket for Air Canada Flight 759 is an extremely entertaining route briefing), and reading Aviation Stack Exchange and pilot forums—then googling for stuff whose existence occurred to me or which I got curious about (ex: searching for answers to my questions, finding the diagrams of my favorite airport and following along as the controllers issued taxi instructions). After all of this, I can understand and follow along with my beloved ATC videos, confuse people around me by quietly reading back controllers’ instructions on LiveATC radio before the pilots of the aircraft being addressed do, and have some understanding of aviation overall.

I do think it could be more efficient (I’m not thinking about efficiency too much because I do so love listening to live ATC communications) to target some central documents—I’ve been meaning to take a look at the FAR/AIM and some aviation-related courses for this reason. Regarding translation, another interest, I learned in a university class that a canonical text is Mona Baker’s In Other Words, so I started reading that to understand the profession of translation enough to feel confident in my own translation work.

How to get to the good stuff… in part 2.

Part 2: The information to consume and where to find it (25 December 2023)

Level up your following of current events (or anything else)

Instead of just reading news articles, you can often go beyond and read the material they’re based on, which has the potential to avoid errors made by journalists (the flip side is that the information might not be adjusted to the level of a layperson, but over time you’ll build fluency). It might take a little more time, but if you have that time it’s likely a good trade, because you also get more information. Here are some of the sources I know of (some of these are subject-specific and might not be too helpful to you if you aren’t looking for aviation accident reports; hopefully they will get you thinking about what similar resources might be available in your target area):

• Press briefings: The State Department’s press briefings, for example, are available on YouTube, and published in a very timely fashion. They’re usually between 30 minutes and an hour, more specifically usually around 45 minutes, so require more time than reading a few articles for me (though doing a deep dive or getting distracted can easily take 45 minutes, and the briefings can be treated like podcasts and maybe sped up; plus, Secretary Blinken’s remarks, also published to the channel, are usually shorter). Notably, the reporters’ questions often don’t get answered—a large part of the briefings consists of Matthew Miller saying things like “I don’t want to comment on that right now” or “I don’t want to preview that”; the alpha is in hearing what the reporters are asking about, which gives you an overview of the current topics. Even though Miller doesn’t give out much new information, IIRC I’ve used the briefings to catch up on / get a picture of the current policies and concerns, and thus profit on Manifold.
• ISW (understandingwar.org): For example, the Institute for the Study of War’s daily updates and map are often what the media is referencing when they highlight developments in the Russia–Ukraine war.
• NTSB/incident/other reports: Much more informative than a news article, and they have what one might call primary source documents, interviews, and so on. For example, instead of reading the (perhaps unclear, incorrect, or short on information) Wikipedia article on an aviation incident, you can go to the report about it and read the transcript of the cockpit dialogue leading up to the incident. A less unwieldy version which is still closer to ground truth is, for instance, the YouTube channel blancolirio, where pertinent parts of NTSB reports and other relevant sources (which right now I don’t know how to put together on my own) are presented in a maybe easier to digest format. There are also YouTube channels which post ATC recordings and flight trajectories for unusual flights. You can also go to liveatc.net and listen to the feeds directly, but the frequency of incidents at any given airport is usually pretty low. I prefer to put on the ATC feed for my local airport, start up low-volume synthwave or lofi behind it, and use that to do work.
• NWS forecasting: When tracking weather, the NWS report is longer and more technical than local reports but has interesting and potentially useful information (for example, did you know a Pineapple Express (which sounds like a good name for a band) is a type of weather occurrence that tends to cause heavy precipitation in California?).
• Freedom House / US State Department human rights reports: Not for current events so much, but I read these in middle school to get the lay of the land regarding the human rights situation in a country. For example, many people probably don’t know about the mistreatment and extreme legal disadvantage of foreign workers in the Gulf countries. Some will argue the sources I’ve mentioned are biased; you can find others, or replace every instance of x with “the US State Department says x”.
• I also look at government websites’ discussion of topics, when applicable. For example, I was recently learning about foster care and looked at the California and US government websites’ discussion of it.
• In addition to searching Google, search Google Scholar and read some published papers about a topic.
• Correspondent friends: It’s been one of my quests for a while—getting more and more fulfilled recently—to acquire contacts in other countries/locations I’m interested in to inform me about conditions on the ground. Correspondents are valuable in a couple of ways: you’ll likely naturally become more informed about the situation on the ground in a place because the correspondent’s local conditions will inform what ey says to you (even something as simple as what holidays ey’s celebrating or what eir school/work day is like, as well as what local/regional/national news ey’s hearing about); the correspondent will, if willing, be able to contextualize, confirm, deny, or add to information you’re receiving from your own sources; a correspondent or other contact with language capabilities can help translate or verify translations and catch mistranslations. Friends who are well-versed/immersed in a particular topic also serve similar functions.
• It might be worth it to find a topic’s experts or enthusiasts in, e.g., a forum for the topic and see what they reference. (Consider Reddit, but also consider that other sites might be better.) For example, they likely won’t just be using Wikipedia (which is kind of for generalists), but will reference their subject-specific (I’m thinking of Esperanto, where the word is faka) resources, reports, and so on.

Some of the goals here are to gain deeper understanding, get one’s world model from sources that are fewer hops of telephone from ground truth, and avoid selection bias in what makes its way through filters.