Find a buddy
Information is complex. You already know that. I'm here to tell you, as someone who freaking loves information, that it's probably even more complex than you currently think. We have a tendency right now, on a social level, to makes things simplified (often binary), and try to silo data/information from humanity. They aren't silos. They are inextricably intertwingled, match each other in complexity, and the connections in how they intertwingle are equally complex as either silo, and it all sits in layers of environments that affect it all on an ongoing basis.
It's still explicable. The average person needs just enough, and that's going to change with our information environment.
Information is the foundation of all of our tribalism. The divisiveness of our politics goes back to information: in what we believe, in what we prioritize, in what we've disregarded, and in how we bring it all together both informationally and socially. But more than anything, we've focused on narrative and perception opinions and allowed them to be misapplied as fundamental truths.
Part of what culture does is provide shortcuts. A word becomes an entire book's worth of meaning. The best way to really start testing and coming to grips with information literacy is with someone you trust to laugh with you and intellectually wrestle with you and still be there the next day/week/month. And that someone has to not be focused on personally being right, but getting to a framework that isn't brittle and doesn't need entire areas of information cut off to function. Don't do it alone. Not only does a buddy help deal with working through complexity, but helps deal with the emotional fallout as we come to grips with mistakes (because of how our culture currently views mistakes).
If there's not an obvious buddy in your life, use this reading as a springboard to start taking higher education classes. Classes – especially those in a conversational format, lectures don't work well – exist because people need to work their way through new and/or complex information, and the buddy system works. The entire class, as long as it's not a lecture, can become your buddy, with a teacher there to manage the assholes. Do pay attention to the environment; some learning institutions are starting to support the assholes and punish teachers; this is not good information literacy. What the class covers is less important than working through learning materials, so choose something interesting.
Every learning – not memory, but understanding and learning – increases your ability to learn again, learn something different, and increases your information literacy.
Riffed from The Problem is Epistemic. The Solution is Not. I completely agree that it takes people; read through this site and you will find the phrase "information and people are inextricably intertwingled" so many times it's not worth counting (also because I know I'll say it again 😉). I don't agree with how he skirts the line with giving up; don't give up. I worry that his only posited solution of labor organization will be it's own curve to make approachable (totally worth it! it's the reason we have any time off, any company-sponsored healthcare, and our median wage stagnation follows the diminishment of unionization! but we're also terribly gaslit about them on a social level). He is absolutely right that finding your culture can make all of the difference.
