Opinion. I mean we tell kids to be wary of strangers, but we can't assign a policeman to every stranger.
Easier to teach people that they can be deceived or that bad things can happen, than to prevent any deception or bad thing from ever occurring.
Easier to teach people that they can be deceived or that bad things can happen, than to prevent any deception or bad thing from ever occurring.
The obvious examples are US news sources such as Fox News, Breitbart and Infowars [1]. However, it could also apply to fast food eating habits.
[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...
On the one hand, I believe information and speech should be mostly unfiltered. If people want to spread information that denies the moon landing or climate change, or extols the existence of teapots revolving about the sun, by all means. I'd rather know who they are and allow them to publicly exercise their ignorance. I assume the public would help cause a correction of the zeitgeist.
On the other hand, the fact is that some people become deeply misinformed and do things against their own interests (e.g. voting for a candidate who promises to undo systems that benefit the voter), which can effect all of us. To spare us from going into the rabbit hole of a party politics, I'll just say I read a recent interview with a voter who wants to get rid of x, even though x in particular crucially provides them a life-saving benefit of y, which they want to keep. How does that even make sense? You delve deeper, and realize that some individuals just listen to the mantra of x being advertised as a terrible thing by certain media and public figures, which is easier to understand than to go into the details as to how specifically it's good and how it specifically could be improved upon.
I'd also add technology, like the internet and smartphones, is affecting our behavior far faster than we're aware and in some ways, I think we need to acknowledge our vulnerability. When media companies or groups of websites can cheaply spread misinformation, it is VERY HARD to combat it, because good information takes time to produce and interpret.
There's a reasonably good account in "Donald Trump breaks the conservative media" http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...
In the health field, we've seen systematic lying by the tobacco industry and the sugar industry, and quite a lot of deception (some no doubt sincere) in the food industry. The "gluten free" craze is one example.
There's a (possibly apocryphal) quote attributed to GK Chesterton that says "When men cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing but in anything."
When people cease to believe their governments, their doctors, their honest fact-checked newspapers and so on, they are easily exploited by snake-oil salesmen.
You mentioned Brexit and Trump, which are case studies in the way people can be influenced by political campaigners, but I find a lot of the criticism of both of those results to be one-sided. After all, it's not as if the official Remain campaign in the UK or the Clinton campaign in the US were telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth either. However, there's less to be gained by fact-checking the losing side once the result is in.
Another recent example that I find more interesting is last week's UK budget. Much has been made of the announced rise in National Insurance rates for self-employed people. It's a controversial issue, because some people do exploit the tax system to pay less than they should by changing their employment status, but also because a lot of people who have never been self-employed themselves really don't understand how it works and tend to leap to conclusions that are objectively wrong. Sadly, rather than starting a potentially useful debate about different ways of working, different levels of risk/reward, and how the tax system should treat them, what has started is a discussion about how the party in power lied (because they gave a manifesto commitment before the last election not to raise the rate for this particular tax), and who can be made to fall on their sword this time to serve the entirely political purposes of who else.
In all of these cases, I think we would have been better off if we'd had a culture that fostered open debate and welcomed but looked critically at advice from those who might have more knowledge or understanding of any given subject. There are a lot of ways we could achieve that, but none of them involve communication channels that seek to influence which messages get through to promote a particular side of the debate. That threat is, in my view, even more serious than politicians who are blatantly lying, because we know some politicians lie a lot and can be sceptical accordingly, but without access to other information as well that scepticism might not make much difference anyway.
Of which newspapers you are talking? I don't think such a thing exists.
They all have trained journalists, sub-editors, and fact checkers. They all correct errors when they make them.
I take comfort in the knowledge that, even if facts don't ultimately win out, human stupidity cannot affect anything beyond this planet.
Even if we end up causing global mass extinctions, life will flourish again in an eon or two.
Even if we develop some sort of planet buster and literally blast Earth to bits, the dust will reform into something else and there's an infinite number of other worlds out there anyway.
Maybe you'll just make a heuristic argument showing that something grows as n² or 2ⁿ? For example, the number of possible relationships among n people grows as n². The world's population of about 7490000000 individuals would support about 28050049996255000000 potential relationships between individuals, or twice that many opinions that individuals have about one another.
That's a reasonable position, but sometimes no amount of preparation can give the little guy adequate protection against a big guy seeking to exploit him. That's why we have legal systems and regulatory frameworks in the first place, and providing a deterrent against big guys taking unfair advantage to reduce the number of times it happens and some sort of remedy for the little guy in the remaining cases is generally a good thing even if it's not a perfect solution.
Continuing this analogy - it actually turns out in practice that child abusers are almost never strangers, but someone known to the child, such as a teacher.