Susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than partisan bias | Hacker News Reader

Susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than partisan bias

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16 pointsohjeez9 comments

It’s not just an issue with fake news. People believe things, both true and false without applying critical thinking.

I recently saw someone objecting to climate change being characterized as a “belief” [1] as it’s a scientific fact. Unfortunately, even with this being the case a large number of people believe in climate change because of their own inherent biases. It’s absolutely possible to hold a belief that is true for the wrong reasons. And in the long term, unless the root causes are addressed equally harmful.

[1] the context was 60% or Americans believing in climate change.

Be nice if people using the term climate change were forced to define exactly what they mean by it instead of throwing it around like some kind of magical incantation.

I've found there's a lot of misinformation surrounding climate change discussions. After digging into it a bit I've found that many people that get called """climate change deniers""" are often people that just disagree with what measures should be taken in order to tackle the problem and its relative severity. I think it can often be summed up by the following: is the cure worse than the disease? To give the most extreme of example: there are people which propose we immediately stop using all fossil fuels and it'll somehow magically make the problem go away. That would be unrealistic and it would destroy the global economy. I haven't found a clearly written analysis of the problem which provides a balanced view of its severity along with reasonable proposals for solutions.

I'm happy to be proven wrong though. Maybe I'll be among someone's lucky 10,000.

"Politically neutral" what ?

As far as I cannot tell neither are really the driving factor, rather it’s a desire to believe. People who want to believe in X look for stories which confirm X. X can be UFO’s, or Muslim rape gangs, the blood libel, or FEMA detention camps... it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the story reinforces the desired beliefs, then many people won’t think too hard about it, they’ll spread it to like-minded people, and reinforce the belief. The thinking looks lazy, and the person may look partisan, but that isn’t the active ingredient. You see this pattern in everyone from free energy cranks, through anti-vaxxers and hyper-partisan ideologues, to people who simultaneously believe that Princess Diana was murdered, and that she faked her own death and is still alive. Likewise people who believed that Osama Bin Laden was dead before the SEAL raid that killed him, were most likely to believe that he wasn’t killed and is still alive!

https://www.livescience.com/18171-contradicting-conspiracy-t...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235449075_Dead_and_...

It’s a breakdown in how humans think and believe, it’s just that. It doesn’t dominate everyone’s thinking, but it dominates enough people to skew elections and online conversations.

I think this is the evident reason. Anybody who's capable of any degree of self reflection can also probably see the exact problem in themselves. When I see a headline that confirms my own biases, I tend to be vastly less critical of it than one that challenges them. I have to consciously force myself to remain critical of things that say what I want to see, and that's very difficult - and something that the vast majority of people clearly do not do. And I think something that's really driving this problem is the deterioration of the media. When articles are increasingly regularly 'factually challenged' it let's people more easily kick in the cognitive dissonance and dismiss everything that opposes their own biases as fake.

And while you're giving some fairly radical examples, this applies to very simple and practical issues. Without stirring the hornet's nest with precise examples, it's safe to say that the reporting on most of any political issue is rarely even remotely impartial. So what is true and what is not? What we tend to believe, one way or the other, is what we want to believe - and you can certainly find some source or another stating it's true. Pair that with social media where people surround themselves with people who all mostly think the same way, and thus share a constant slew of sources all saying what these people collectively want to hear, and it leads sort of parallel realities where two large groups of people might see the color green, but one collectively convinces themselves it's blue, and the other that it's red.

"Anybody who's capable of any degree of self reflection can also probably see the exact problem in themselves. "

It has less to do with an ABILITY of self reflection than with a POSTURE to take in context. Look around you, you'll most probably meet many people who are ABLE to think "critically" yet fall for fake news and hoaxes. Also, there's the fact that it's easier to detect false information on questions you are familiar with.

"it's easier to detect false information on questions you are familiar with"

That's so important.

The old "modern" news has _long_ assumed a local minimum of giving the remaining audience strong opinions on things they have not personally checked. Distilled; it's a final pointless outburst of pretend-informed righteousness.

If I'm waiting somewhere watching the network that shall not be named it's an odd mix of funny and terrifying; the stuff they implicitly assume their readers do not know is so trivial... at some point you must assume it's not an accident that they also pretend not to know the unmentioned basic info.

I could link a wall of specifics, but why? Most people don't respond to being told they are wrong (myself in 04' included).

Deliberately tangential example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R3BN4T6XMw

Yeah but the partisanship, or ideology in general for that matter, can basically be a core reason why people "want to believe" in X. Why would one "want to believe" in Muslim rape gangs other than to confirm previous beliefs on muslims.

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