February 5, 2025
On Interesting Recommendations
I'm still working on these thoughts, but I've had one too many knee jerk reactions to people's podcasts recommendations recently, and want to interrogate my own feelings on the matter.
One result of today's high information load environment, is that i'm constantly being recommended new things to consume. I've gone through a large effort to remove algorithmic recommendations, and mainly curate an RSS feed which I tend to over time. I also get recommendations from friends and family.
I'm finding that I can draw a line between two types of recommendations that are given to me:
- Entertainment based recommendations,
- Truth based recommendations.
Now the line between these two might seem blurry at first, so lets dig into it a little:
Entertainment based Recommendations
Here I classify most recommendations. Watch this movie, listen to this song, read this book (usually of fiction, but also maybe non-fiction). One specific aspect of this category of recommendations, is that they don't make any strong claims to represent reality, or the truth. Some might make weaker claims on accurately representing reality, I categorise here podcasts on philosophy, books about historical or real people, that sort of thing.
Truth based Recommendations
These are recommendations where someone has consumed some information media, and the truth that the information claims to show is interesting / mind-blowing / bias confirming. Things that fall squarely into this category are podcasts, videos, books or articles about health, about history, about politics. Anything making a strong claim to represent the truth about reality.
One thing that I spend a lot of time doing, as I mentioned, is curating my RSS feeds, and my informational sources. Especially those that make strong claims on surfacing information that represents a truth about reality. This is a hard thing to do. There is a lot of information out there, most of it wrong, a lot of it wrong on purpose, but some of it - and this is the tricky part - only slightly wrong. It's information that is truth adjacent.
If you're a person who enjoys having a broad general knowledge base, a corollary is enjoying consuming lots of true information. However, there are just too many specialities and rabbit holes out there to be a good judge as to the veracity of the information being consumed. So, you have to delegate trust, usually to some authority figure.
This should be a long, methodical process. Abdicating your responsibility to verify the truthfulness of information, and delegating it to another is not something to do lightly. It will, after all, shape your view of the world. We sort of have to do it though - we have to find aggregators, curators, experts on various topics who we trust to find the truth and distil it into information we can consume. We can see just how much this role as 'purveyor of information' is prized by society by looking at top ranking podcasts, or shows are. So many take the form of interviews - the authority figure we have chosen to find information for us is curating an expert on a topic. They think the topic is interesting, and they think that expert has a good model of reality as it realities to that topic. So they produce a show for us to consume!
So I've developed a bit of a rule for myself: where I delegate my fact gathering to a curator/aggregator, if they repeatedly pass on information that demonstrably false - or not verifiably true - then I simply stop consume information from them. The risk of having that information shape my world view just isn't worth it. Unfortunately - that means I won't listen to most of the top health podcasts. They repeatedly platform fringe beliefs or ideologies, and let them pass their theories off as truth. They let their guests make extraordinary claims, without demanding extraordinary evidence. Quite the opposite, they often widen their eyes, gasp, and say "oh my gosh, why don't more people know this?!?!".