Can we be self-critical?

Our out of self-control media is why self-skepticism is more than ever critical, as is some working understanding of epistemology. One has to A) know that they don't know, and B) know with their gut that what they think is content and training, not-self. There are simple, to protracted, thought experiments that lead to the latter understanding if one doesn't have it already through experience. If we define thinking, as Heinlein wrote in a short tract* I often re-post, as "integrating data and arriving at correct answers" we have to remember that that data needs to be as complete and accurate as possible. What used to be reportage and journalism has, at least in our society, become opining and emotionalizing to too far an extent. It seems that our adoration of self generated opinions has become far more valuable to us than dealing with reportage and facts as best we can gather them.

We have enshrined personal views as the highest value over the fields of facts and data. Like many do with the Bible, not reading and it all and being selective, we do that as well with the real world and arrive at an equally distorted view of the whole. Data and context are sacrificed for slant and emotional impact. If we don't engage humanity's greatest gift, the ability to self-observe, it's way too easy to be swayed by the riptides of suggestion. We tend most to abandon long term and worldwide system views, as well as not accounting for our own nature and that, in general, of being human rather than political.