In my last diary one of the commentators asked me to be specific about strategies to:
keep yourself honest without also becoming completely ineffective?
When I was still pretty young (17 or so) I got a leadership position in a group that ranged from about 80-250 people. One of the most interesting lessons I learned had to do with conflict resolution and it was this: If two people come to you with a dispute you are going to hear two different accounts of the same event. Both accounts are true to the person telling them. Your job as a mediator is rarely ever to determine which side is "most true" and side with that person. There was actually some True version of what happened but it is likely not the version that either party experienced. You have to hear them both out, gather as much evidence as you can and (unless the evidence is overwhelmingly one sided) make a judgement based on your own plausible interpretation of the event. Do so knowing that both parties are likely still convinced of the truth of what they experienced.
The most effective strategy I have found for this is to look deeply into things you hear instead of taking them at face value. As you do so you will often find that things differ from the version as it was initially presented to you. I'll give a real world example.
At dinner with my (conservative) parents a while ago, I heard a story about how schools were throwing away lunches brought by students and making parents pay for chicken nuggets instead. This was how the story was presented to them (probably either by Limbaugh or O'Reilly or some other such type) and it fit with their biases so they accepted it. It sounded fishy to me so I looked up the original story. Reading the local report gives a different impression. The Fox version is big on telling you about the federal government guidelines and the state agent inspecting lunches. The local version sounds like some school administrator made a mistake at work that day. It was a failure of a government system. Probably not one that warrants a national news story; so the national news agency made it into something that would.
Another good example that I happened on today can be found here. The author states that the headline was suspect (they usually are) and that digging closer to the source gave a much more accurate picture of the research and its findings. It's more work than just reading the headline or the first paragraph but it's important for keeping your viewpoint honest.
It is also important to be able recognize your own biases when you hear them. I was listening to a radio interview with a local union representative and he made the statement, "In a perfect world, everyone would be in a union." It's important to give that a second thought. A union is a solution to a problem. In a perfect world no one would have to be in a union. Just because we have a preferred way of doing things that doesn't make it the best one.
I think this diary has gotten long enough so I will end by saying that I am not at all advocating you don't make a decision or don't take a side. I'm not trying to say you should remain neutral, be ineffective or give equal time to people who think the earth is flat. I am saying, and I believe Mill in my previous post was saying, that you need an honest and informed view of the issue in order to make a judgement. One last specific example to make my point.
In the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham a question was posed
5. What if anything would ever change your mind?
Ham's response, as I interpreted it was that nothing could. That some things about his view were subject to change but that factual events as detailed in the Bible are non disputable. Nye's response was, Evidence. I find one of these profoundly more compelling and am now able to make a clear choice.