Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Troy Swanson: Wayne, welcome to Circulating Ideas.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Thank you for inviting me, Troy.

Troy Swanson: Over the last few years, I’ve interviewed librarians, journalists, psychologists, even some neuroscientists, to help us understand how we think about information, how we process information as humans. I read your book, Virtue Information Literacy, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I thought it offers an interesting commentary on many of these ideas and the conversations from the past. So that’s why I’m excited to have you here today. Maybe just to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about your work as a librarian?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Sure. At Princeton, where I’ve been for almost 23 years, the subject specialists manage budgets, build collections, liaise with departments, and provide specialized research classes and consultations. So I do that for the departments of philosophy, religion, and anthropology. I do a lot of work with juniors and seniors on their independent research projects, and I also teach information literacy classes and have research consultations for students in first year writing courses at Princeton.

Troy Swanson: Great. So this book is like right up your professional alley, right?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: I wrote it inspired by my practice.

Troy Swanson: As we should, right? Well, you open up the book with the idea of information anarchy, and it seemed like a logical point to start this conversation. Can you tell us what you mean by “information anarchy” and how that idea is relevant to us today?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Sure. So, to clarify, I mean “information anarchy” to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. In political philosophy, anarchy just means absence of rulers. It doesn’t mean chaos or disorganization or any of the usual mistaken stereotypes. It just means people aren’t ordering you about. They’re also not creating or solving problems for you. So you have anarchism whenever you have people coming together and organizing themselves to solve their problems without other people telling them what to do.

And I mean by information anarchy, that there are no universally regarded information authorities to control the flow and interpretation of information. So some people claim to be authorities: politicians, scientists, YouTube influencers. Some people claim that we should accept certain authorities, and some people are widely considered authorities within specific domains, often scientists, experts, that sometimes they wander out of, but still those so called authorities still can’t dictate what information people accept. So even when they try to restrict the flow of information, I say through political means, they ultimately fail; I mean, the internet libraries.

So because that’s the information world we inhabit, like it or not, to be information literate, I argue, we have to work hard on cultivating the skills and intellectual virtues necessary to find and evaluate the best information and use it effectively, and we have to because nobody will do it for us. And we live in a society, I believe, that tries very hard to trade our minds to distraction and anger and away from information literacy.

Troy Swanson: From that, you build the idea of virtue information literacy, which I think is great, but before we get into virtue information literacy, this is built on the ideas of philosophy, which your book I think hits very well, of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. I know that these are really big areas of study, and I’m sure that we could do several hours on just digging into that, but could you give us kind of the big picture overview of these two big ideas of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Yeah. And to be clear, I’m not a professional philosopher. I am not a specialist, but yeah, very briefly virtue ethics considers ethics to be a matter of cultivating moral character excellences or virtues “arete” in Greek, rather than, say, dutifully following a list of rules, Ten Commandments, that sort of thing. We’re trying to calculate the greatest good for the greatest number, right? So the theory is if one develops virtues such as justice, courage, prudence, wisdom, friendliness, benevolence, etcetera, then one will be able to act in the most moral way in any given situation. So morality is about character and habit. And I believe virtue ethics is how most people raise children. You cultivate good habits: say please and thank you, don’t scream in the house, stop hitting your sister, etc. Then you hope for the best.

So virtue epistemology extends that to knowledge practices. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and knowing. And the virtue epistemology I write about in the book argues that we’re more likely to gain knowledge if we cultivate a range of intellectual virtues or excellences. And there are many such virtues. And some I discuss in the book are open-mindedness, intellectual humility, epistemic modesty, intellectual courage, intellectual caution, thoroughness, curiosity, epistemic justice. If we’re open minded rather than dogmatic, we’ll be more likely to get things right than otherwise, and as with virtue ethics, becoming a better knower is a matter of character and habit. Read carefully. Always explore other points of view. Don’t ignore counter evidence. Keep in mind just how ignorant you are, etc.

Troy Swanson: The point kind of hits me, it’s like a practice. Sometimes we think about knowledge as this formula, but what virtue ethics and virtue epistemology really emphasize is a way of being, a habit of mind. Is that accurate?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Yes, it’s a practice. It’s an activity. It’s not just a thing that happens. It’s a thing we have to do.

Troy Swanson: Yeah, I like that so much. I think that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so then help us take this one step further and help us see, then, what is virtue information literacy?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Well, that’s the fairly easy one. After everyone else has done all the intellectual heavy lifting, I took the rather simple move of applying that from knowledge to information literacy. I argue that we’re more likely to be information literate in a very strong sense, is what I’m talking about, if we cultivate these intellectual virtues, that is, we’re more likely to be able to find the most accurate information possible, evaluate it according to the most rigorous standards, and incorporate it usefully into our lives if we’re open minded, epistemically modest, intellectually thorough. So I just borrow all that work and say, this also works for intellectual information literacy. And then throughout the book, I make various arguments of how that works.

Troy Swanson: Absolutely. And I think some convincing arguments. In those arguments, you talk about a number of these information virtues, and I thought it would be good to try to unpack a few of them. We don’t need to go through all of them because I hope people will read the book, but I thought there’s a few that would be fun to talk a little bit about, and I was wondering if we could start with information humility.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Yeah, so humility in this context is having a sense of your limitations. I think of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, a man who was very sure of himself. He was once asked if he would be willing to die for any of his beliefs. “No,” he said, “because I could be wrong.” People often hold a number of very questionable beliefs, and they are absolutely sure that they’re right and when presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary cling even more to those questionable beliefs.

So in the book, I label that “ignarrogance”. I coined that term. It’s ignorance combined with intellectual arrogance, and I think that’s the greatest intellectual vice. I think that’s what Socrates was arguing against when he said, “The one thing I know is that I know nothing.” We are all vastly ignorant. Think of the most erudite expert, Nobel Prize winner, whatever you can. What don’t they know? Almost everything outside of their specialization.

And even what we do know is always partial and perspectival. There’s 8 billion of us and we all have a different view of the world. So information or intellectual humility is admitting our fallibility. We could be wrong. Of course, we have to act as if we think we’re right, but we should also be constantly aware that we could be wrong, and at the very least, that our knowledge and our information is never absolute and complete, at least if we want to be information literate.

Troy Swanson: Yeah, seems particularly relevant today. How about the idea of epistemic justice?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Well, epistemic justice comes from the philosopher Miranda Fricker’s excellent book, Epistemic Injustice. She discusses two particular kinds of epistemic injustice mostly testimonial and hermeneutical. So testimonial injustice is when we do not believe someone because of factors irrelevant to the content of their message. So for example, a jury might not believe a witness simply because they’re a drug addict, even if drug addiction was irrelevant to the testimony. “It’s a bad character, we can’t trust them.”

Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation. Hermeneutical injustice is when we don’t have the vocabulary to interpret our experiences, especially our unjust experiences. So for example say women in the 1940s experiencing sexual harassment when sexual harassment wasn’t yet conceptualized in the way it became in later feminism, so they didn’t have a good vocabulary for interpreting those experiences that we would consider unjust.

Epistemic testimonial justice means taking information seriously and evaluating it by standards relevant to it rather than to the source of the information. So many people evaluate information depending on say the political ideology or the identity as we say today of the source of the information, regardless of its relevance. They might disregard information on climate change, for example, because someone from a particular political party distributes that information.

Hermeneutical justice comes up all the time. Critical race theory is a good example. Whatever you think of it, critical race theory increases our capacity to interpret our experiences in the world so banning any talk of race in classrooms, for example, is an attempt to deliberately reduce our capacity to interpret our world by controlling the flow of information. It’s a form of hermeneutical injustice. Banning children’s books that discuss LGBTQ themes is a form of hermeneutical injustice. All of them want to restrict the information available for interpreting the world by imposing their political values onto other people.

The world is complex, and I think the more complex our available information, the more capacity we have to interpret the world and increasing that information and making it available as a form of epistemic justice.

Troy Swanson: Building on information, humility and epistemic justice, I think a logical next step is the idea of information vigilance. I think there is definitely a connection there. Could you help us understand information vigilance?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: That’s one of the key chapters in the book. Information vigilance is my attempt to apply Buddhist mindfulness to information literacy. Mindfulness is often defined as non-judgmental awareness at the present moment. If you read an article on mindfulness meditation in Pali, it’s sati, but in Buddhism, it’s more than that. It’s mindfulness with clear comprehension. As one writer puts it, sati sampajanna; or as I put it vigilance. You’re not just aware of the present moment, or in this case, of information you’re consuming, but you’re also evaluating it in the light of, in this case, Buddhist teachings and working to cultivate skillful responses, so there’s generosity and patience and reduce unskillful responses: anger, hatred, lust, et cetera. So one is not just aware of the present moment, but constantly looking out, being vigilant for, and then evaluating the variety of our mental and emotional reactions to the world and trying to deal with them skillfully, right? So anger arises. I’m not just aware of it. I respond to it by cultivating patience.

Information vigilance is bringing that same attention to every bit of information we encounter, whether it’s something someone tells us, or we spot on social media or read in a book or on the news, all information is subject to testing. And the more important it is that we get it right, the more we should test it, so we should always be looking out for information and testing against various standards.

Troy Swanson: It makes a lot of sense. That connects into so many places, especially I was thinking of Mike Caulfield’s work on fact checking to like notice your emotional reactions, to reflect back. So the last virtue, there’s so much, each of these, we could go into so much depth, but just one more, I wanted to touch that I thought that our listeners would appreciate is the idea of information asceticism, and it seems really important to the larger arguments about virtue, information, literacy.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Information asceticism, possibly my only slightly original contribution to the conversation. Asceticism like anarchism is often misunderstood. It just means training. But because of the rather extreme forms of training some people have historically done, especially for spiritual purposes, like starvation or flagellation, it has some extreme connotations.

But in my sense, information asceticism builds on information vigilance. I argue in the book that we should constantly examine and evaluate all of the information we encounter, and in a typical day we encounter a lot of information and doing so consistently is the training, and with enough training, we develop good information habits.

So in the book, I suggest some tests to apply to all information, for example. It’s five tests. So I give the utility test. Do I need this information? What will I do with it? Is it really worthwhile or useful? Am I actively consuming this or passively consuming it? Does it benefit my life or detract from it? And how many of us just consume information without even asking those questions?

The logical test, is this information accurate, reliable, justified, evidenced, true? How do I know? What does it really say? What do others say about this?

The ethical tests. Whose interest does this information serve? What can I tell about the ethical character of the information producers? And what kind of person does consuming this information make me?

The emotional test. What is my emotional response to this? Am I angry, sad, frustrated? Does my ego feel challenged? Why might I feel this way? And perhaps more important, related to an earlier one, who’s profiting from my reaction to this?

And finally, the virtues test. Am I practicing these intellectual virtues that will allow me to more skillfully handle this information, open mindedness, intellectual humility, epistemic modesty, intellectual courtesy, courage, thoroughness? Et cetera.

So applying these tests, or something like them, over and over until they become habitual is information asceticism, mind training. This is the information equivalent of evaluating, say, the present moment through the Buddhist moral precepts or the six perfections.

Troy Swanson: So the five tests are utility, logic, ethics, emotions, virtues.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Virtues, yep.

Troy Swanson: Yeah, okay, just to summarize.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: So that’s at the end of one of the chapters. I can’t remember which chapter at the moment.

Troy Swanson: So that should be the librarian tattoo. We need to make a symbol for that or something.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: I need to make a little rubric for people to apply in the classroom.

Troy Swanson: Right, right. But you know, joking aside, it makes a lot of sense, right? These are one of these things that I appreciate this piece of the book, because for all of my reading and things that I’ve been looking at when I saw this, it rings true. I think all of us that are doing this work see this and are like, yeah, like that’s exactly the kinds of pieces that we need to pull together. So it’s fantastic.

To shift a little bit. In your book, you talk about the extended mind, especially in the context of the work of Andy Clark and David Chalmers. And with some of my interests, that definitely was a point that caught my attention. And so I wanted to see if you could help explain that. I think it’s particularly useful to our information world and also to connect with us in libraries.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Yeah, and there’s a cottage industry about extended mind. This article was published, I think, in 1998, and there’s been 25 years of writing about this. Chalmers and Clark argued that the world outside our head can function as an extension of our minds, and I’m gonna give a quote here, “If it functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process” close quote.

So they discuss a couple named Otto and Inga who’ve become rather famous in this literature. Inga has a normally functioning memory, but Otto’s memory is terrible. So anything he needs to remember, anything, not just grocery lists, but directions to the store, things he should do, anything, he writes in his notebook. So they argue that, functionally, Otto’s notebook is an extension of his mind. So that was in 1998. These days, we could perhaps consider smartphones an extension of our mind, or more specifically, say, the Bear notes app on my phone and computer certainly function that functions as an extension of my mind. LastPass functions as an extension of my mind.

So others expand the concept of extended mind to the evolutionary theory of niche construction, and I write about that in the book. A lot of animals construct niches to optimize their environment for themselves. Think bird nests, beaver dams, human houses. And to apply this to libraries, I guess, is a form of extended mind. I argue that college libraries are good examples of extended mind, particularly of cognitive niche construction, and they’re specifically cognitive niche constructions designed to encourage the cultivation of intellectual virtues, even if that’s not the way we thought about it when we plan them.

So virtues and vices are developed within specific environments with specific incentives. We can learn better to be open minded, intellectually humble, etc. if our environment encourages these virtues. So a couple of examples. A scholarly journal versus the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. These provide radically contrasting environments to encourage intellectual virtues. For scholarly articles, often not always, but often make relatively careful claims supported by some sort of reason, evidence, argumentation relevant to particular epistemic communities, an academic discipline or something. Tweets don’t do that. They can’t really do that. They’re too short; they’re too contextless. So scholarly publications encourage reflection, intellectual caution, while Twitter encourages quick takes and rewards rage and aggression, and it’s true mob behavior and group think can exhibit themselves in any information environment, but they manifest in different ways.

Now, college libraries typically have a wide range of books and journals, but not an unlimited range, and that is by choice. The books and journals are often chosen to meet certain scholarly standards, so undergraduates don’t just wander among junk information. Librarians have been doing this for almost a century, carefully curating collections. So these days that doesn’t help much. Students probably rely more on Internet sources than scholarly books and journals. So now librarians, and this has been going on since at least the seventies, spend a lot of time and effort creating research guides, teaching classes on research methods and information literacy, to help students respond to information more virtuously, to develop the caution and the skepticism and the open mindedness and the curiosity. It might be a losing battle, but academic librarians have been trying to create virtuous information environments of some sort for a long time.

Troy Swanson: I feel like working in a library makes me a better person. I think that’s also true of students in our libraries become better students. I think you really coin, I’ve never put these things together, but that the work, the existence of our libraries around these ideas and the virtues help us live those virtues through and through. So it’s really fantastic.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: And I mean, and scholars have been writing about trying to create virtues in students for a century or more as well. Historians have certain values that they want to uphold, philosophers, literary scholars, et cetera, and libraries have been trying to help with that. Whether we succeed, well, it’s not our fault. We do our best.

Troy Swanson: Another piece of your book among many noteworthy pieces, but one that really caught my eye is your discussion about Buddhist mindfulness, which you’ve touched on a little bit in some of the scientific research around mindfulness and how this might relate to information literacy, and I have some interest in this because, in my own reading and writing, I’ve accidentally wandered my way to some of these similar ideas, maybe not quite exactly the same, but in the same ballpark and that kind of practice and self-awareness, and some of those virtues, I know that might not be the best use of that word, that the Buddhists have encouraged, I think also seems applicable to our information environment that we’re in, so maybe, could you give us your perspective on this and us see this connection?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: It’s very easy to, especially today with the barrage of information, to train your mind to distraction, anger, rage, hatred, rather than say concentration, mental tranquility. And those are two of the factors of Buddhist awakening as it happens.

So social and mainstream media, they profit from our constant attention. Attention is a commodity and it’s one we give them. And what do we get in return? Well, that’s questionable. It’s a constant attention to a barrage, mostly useless, sometimes harmful information, and we indulge them: binge watching doom scrolling, being a news junkie, passively consuming, never pausing to think, question, consider, because we’re too tired, too distracted, too angry, whatever reason.

So Buddhist meditation practices, or practices inspired by Buddhist meditation, for which most of the mindfulness practices are, and there are lots of them, they can help us recondition our minds to perceive reality in a different way: more focused, more tranquil, perhaps more benevolent, generous, with greater understanding. I’m a fairly serious Zen practitioner, and I’ve watched my own reaction to the world change significantly over the years because of my practice. Part of writing the book is I wanted to share some of that in my professional librarian capacity that seemed especially applicable.

 I mostly focused on mindfulness because that’s the word everyone uses, including the psychologists to study the topic, and there’s mindfulness, there’s focused concentration mindfulness, there’s open awareness mindfulness, there’s mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of breathing. There’s a lot of kind of mindfulness, and psychologists study this and Buddhist practice this, and a lot of secular people do as well.

Now, I criticized what I called the “clickbait McMindfulness” and that’s the one that claims mindfulness cures all ills. You’ll always see, it’ll always be a very thin, pretty white woman with her eyes closed and she looks blissful and “this cured my cancer,” that kind of thing. It’s not true. It will not do that, but even the most cautious scientific research and some of it’s not cautious, but even the most cautious research suggests it does increase concentration. It does increase mental tranquility. It helps us distance ourselves from our immediate reactions to the world.

 So I believe based on the scientific research, the testimony of 2500 years of Buddhist practitioners and my own practice over the last 10 or 12 years, that Buddhist meditation and mind training exercises are excellent ways to train your mind and to build more effective mental habits. So if your mind is calm, concentrated, if you’re able to distance yourself from your most passionately held beliefs and prejudices, as mindfulness meditation teaches us to do, you’ll definitely be able to consume information more cautiously, evaluate it more thoroughly and use it more effectively. And if you don’t believe it, try it for yourself!

Troy Swanson: Give it the Pepsi challenge. My interest, and I think this fits so well, modern neuroscience is showing us that so much of the way that we see the world comes from unconscious processing that our brain is modular, and that we make all kinds of decisions with different mechanisms in our brain and those decisions arrive into our consciousness.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Sure.

Troy Swanson: And I’ve seen the potential and I’ve got to say, I’m not a strict practitioner. My academic life maybe doesn’t intersect with my personal life as much as it should, but mindfulness as maybe an avenue to a metacognitive stance, to put it another way, that seems in line with what you’re describing?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: So I like the way I think it’s Joseph Epstein, I can’t remember the writer, David Epstein maybe, he has a book called Thoughts Without a Thinker, and basically, we don’t think thoughts; thoughts think us. Just like, in a way, we don’t speak language; language speaks us. That thoughts and emotions just arise.

I often talk about it as the stories our mind tells about reality and these stories are all conditioned. They come from somewhere, but that’s not reality itself. It’s always conditioned, and we’re interpreting reality all of the time. Part of information literacy is trying to get those interpretations as accurate as we can get given our always limited information.

Troy Swanson: Yeah, absolutely. It makes so, so much sense. At the end of your book, you make a fairly bold, but I think really convincing claim, that virtue information literacy can bring us to the philosophical goal of a quote unquote, life well lived. You argue for a larger type of information literacy that’s not just skills-based, not just searching and clicking, which makes sense. Something that’s not just focused on writing research papers, but something that’s more integrated into our purpose for existing into our daily lives. And so could you build this argument for us without spoiling the book maybe, but help us see this big idea?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Yeah. The life well lived; the Greeks called it “eudaimonia.” We sometimes call it happiness or flourishing. I think flourishing is actually the subtitle of the book, “how to flourish in an age of information anarchy.” And that’s what I mean. So my overall argument is that information literacy, in a strong sense, isn’t a set of skills, but a way of life. Many years ago on my blog, I think I compared information literacy in this strong sense to basically I saw no difference between that and a good liberal education. It is not just a quick analysis.

Information can be expanded to include just about all of our interactions with the world. We read, we watch, we listen, we discuss, we’re bombarded with news, claims, hot takes, opinions, a lot of bullshit. Unless we take steps to curate the flow of information, interrogate every bit we encounter, mostly we don’t, and engage our critical evaluative mind, what Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow calls System 2 thinking, the slow mind that takes a while to get going. We usually react on our fast mind. That’s not something you get in a 50 minute info lit session or applying an evaluation rubric to a website, and that’s a lot of what librarians do because that’s what we can do. That’s what we have time to do, and I criticize people who criticize librarians for not doing more in the book.

But you can in a broader sense, train your mind to apply such rubrics to every bit of information you encounter. And when you start looking, it’s a lot. It’s every day, much of the day, and that especially, especially depending on how much time you spend consuming media, mainstream or social, doesn’t matter. Information literacy in this strong sense just should become the way we habitually respond to the world because for many of us the world is information all the way down. So information literacy helps change the way we experience the world, hopefully for the better. Hopefully it leads to a more flourishing life.

Troy Swanson: And so then help dig into this a little bit more. If you had to give me the recommendation, step one, what does step one look like?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: How about how about steps one through 10? I don’t know. I have a few. I jotted down some notes.

The first is, overall, it’s mind training in the intellectual virtues. So virtue information literacy isn’t just something you might teach. This is not a classroom how to book as a few of my otherwise kind reviewers have critically noted. This is kind of a physician heal thyself book. Everybody wants to change the world, but no one wants to change themselves.

I’ve been an academic librarian for almost 25 years and I have seen no evidence that we are more intellectually virtuous than the average person most of the time. We teach this, but do we apply it to every bit of our lives? So virtue information literacy is something you practice yourself and then it changes the way you do everything.

I might start with some mindfulness of breathing meditation, 20 minutes a day to get you started, to help you watch your thoughts and emotions rise and pass away and realize that you are not your thoughts and emotions. There are the tests I mentioned earlier, utility, logical, ethical, emotional, virtues tests. Apply those tests to every claim you read or hear.

Constantly challenge your own beliefs, challenge those of everyone else. Usually we just challenge those of everyone else. Work on your own vices first. We all have a tendency to confuse our opinions for knowledge, to conflate the stories our mind tells about reality for reality itself, and often we’re prone to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias. We usually form beliefs just because of conditioning, temperament, perspective, values, worldview, upbringing, and then we try to find evidence to support those beliefs. It’s sort of like the students who ask librarians, “Can you help me find five scholarly sources supporting this claim?” “Why, no. No, I can’t because that’s not how research works.” We also tend to willingly accept evidence supporting our beliefs and aggressively resist evidence that opposes them. So step back from your beliefs, challenge your beliefs, cultivate open mindedness. Just how sure are you that you’re absolutely right and people who disagree with you are absolutely wrong? Cultivate epistemic modesty and intellectual humility. Keep reminding yourself that we are all vastly ignorant. We’re fallible creatures. Our opinions are always limited, partial, perspectival, biased and so are other people’s.

Challenge information that confirms your beliefs, and especially if that information evokes a strong emotional reaction. To paraphrase the stoic philosopher Epictetus, information doesn’t bother us, only our judgments about it. So the news makes you angry? Well, the anger is in your mind, not the news, and we know this because whatever news it is, other people approve of it or they don’t care. So try to figure out, why am I reacting this way and why are these people wanting me to react this way? Maybe try to figure out why other people don’t agree with you, to seek out knowledge, try to understand the world as they do, and you’ll become hopefully a lot less intellectually arrogant as you realize just how partial and contextual and limited your own views are. I tend to agree with John Stuart Mill that if you don’t understand why your opponents believe as they do, you don’t even understand your own beliefs very well. So some very practical things.

Perhaps cut most social and mainstream media out of your life, at least for a while. It’s mostly clickbait. Stop wasting time arguing with people on social media. Nobody ever wins an argument. You’re not setting them straight or whatever you think you’re doing. Get rid of the alerts. Stop posting. Stop liking. Stop producing hot takes. Produce more cold takes instead. If you have to engage with social media, set a timer and disengage when it goes off.

Maybe resist the craving to form an opinion about everything in the entire world. In the book, I discussed Patrick Wilson’s 1983 book, Secondhand Knowledge. It’s a great book, highly recommend it. Wilson argues that reference librarians, for example, at least in their professional capacity should be Pyrrhonists. Pyrrhonists were skeptics who achieve mental tranquility by reserving judgments about non evident things, and non-evident things includes pretty much everything people actually argue about. Because we don’t tend to argue about whether putting our hand in the fire will burn it.

Social media feeds the craving people have to opine about everything, even though most of our opinions about most topics are poorly informed and irrelevant. It just doesn’t matter what I believe about most things, or what you believe, or what the listeners believe, and if you seriously examine your opinions, carefully evaluate how many of them actually matter for the world, you might be unpleasantly surprised at just how irrelevant most of your views are. And my views, that’s not just your views, Troy, and it’s a great first step to cultivating intellectual humility. So maybe just stop having opinions or stop expressing them. And that’s one reason I more or less stopped blogging several years ago. I rarely post anything on social media. I offer my opinions pretty much only when asked, like today.

So maybe spend your time, instead of all that, doing something good in the world, even if just for yourself: meditate, go for a walk, read a book, watch a movie, spend time with loved ones. You’re angry about the world. Well, the internet’s not the real world. You think the real world is an unjust place. I’m right there with you. Maybe stop ranting about it on social media. Concern yourself with what you can control. Go volunteer someplace. Go protest. Go do something practical. You can’t solve all the world’s problems, but you might be able to solve some of the world’s problems if you stop doom scrolling and start acting.

So all of these activities will make your mind, and hopefully the world, a better place. So a few things might happen if you do all these and they’re really hard to do and take years to practice but first you might slow down your consumption of information as you evaluate it more. That’s wise. Most of it’s probably junk information. Second, you might curate your information sources more carefully so you get less noise and more signal as you realize just how much of that junk information you’ve been consuming, how much time you’ve wasted. Third you’ll train your mind to concentration and tranquility. And fourth, if you spend your time acting instead of reacting, with concentration and tranquility, instead of rage and distraction, you might actually help some people who need help, including yourself. And eventually, you might even become information literate. I’m still working on that.

Troy Swanson: The lifelong pursuit.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Information literacy is a way of life.

Troy Swanson: It is, absolutely. To go back, I mentioned noticing the emotions and you had mentioned if something makes you angry, I think that’s true. The harder thing for me is noticing the things that I agree with, because it’s easy to let those blur away and then that’s where you’re not questioning the beliefs because you’re just grabbing onto things, the confirmation bias, and I think that’s sometimes the biggest challenge in our polarized information world where you tend to listen to sources that agree with your views of the world and how do you break out of that?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: We’re very prone to it. I started a project about 25 years ago where I deliberately tried to figure out why do these people have different political beliefs than me? And I started when I thought politics was a spectrum. I started with the right and worked my way back to the left and read as much as I could. Why do people who aren’t like me believe as they do? And it was, it’s still illuminating. I still try to seek out alternative views. Often, I don’t agree with them. Often, I dismiss them, but I dismiss them after as much evaluation and try to be generous and fair as I can.

Troy Swanson: Yeah, it’s a good practice. Well, Wayne, I thank you so much for this conversation. If our listeners wanted to find your book, especially to add it to their library collections, where could they do that?

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Well, direct from the publisher, Library Juice Press from Amazon, Gobi, Baker & Taylor probably, what’s the saying? Wherever fine books are sold.

Troy Swanson: That’s right. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.

Wayne Bivens-Tatum: Well, thank you, Troy. It’s been a pleasure being here.