Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.
Given that it happens so commonly around retirement, I think this is a function of not wanting to struggle or achieve anything anymore, and therefore succumbing fully to a convenient view, one which gives you a thing to worry about apart from your age and declining health, something participatory without being difficult. "Never mind my hip! What about those DEMOCRATS!!!"
I’m getting up there in age and I’m worried about this myself. My criteria for retirement is not just that I have enough money to stop working, but that I also have enough to travel or do a hobby and stay mentally engaged with something.
This is perhaps the most ironic thing.
This will likely lead to another push for controlling the internet/media a la net neutrality, because we all know people can't be left to do their own research, use any amount of discernment, or have an alternative viewpoint.
Bring forth the gulags, the people need jobs...
Instead, it benefited the likes of Netflix at the expense of the telecom industry. It also put the internet in a legal classification that would allow more government control of speech, though this had not yet been much of an issue in practice.
None of the above seems to have made much of a difference to end users.
It would be great to have a new sort of net neutrality, focused on end users. A nice thing about the end of the old one is that a new one could replace it, giving people what they mistakenly thought they had.
How unfortunate that this generation's social scientists are interested only in grinding and swinging the axe in one political direction. ;-)
There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.
I can only guess that things must have gone downhill when the site was taken over by Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has some pretty right-wing political views. That said, there's also a kind of natural affinity in the humiliated-outsider-mentality that 4chan had that fits with Nazism in a way that I feel has become more and more clear in recent years.
I wonder if your dad is ex-military?
Of course, all of that's older enlisted guys, (think vietnam era NCOs), which are the only ones I know. It would be interesting to find out if ex-military older commissioned guys find the same humor in any of what the country's going through. I'd like to think they wouldn't, but who knows?
A little known comedian named Connor O'Malley had a series of comedy sketches about a fake website called truthhunters.com that I think captures it dangerously well.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=truth+hunters+c...
I've recently added DW.com to my regular news scan, joining the BBC and the trad USA outlets (AP, Reuters, NPR).
Your father notwithstanding, I think education and awareness have a lot to do with who gets sucked into the fake news vortex and who doesn't. On the other hand, I've seen some of my friends whom I thought would know better post some real dingers at times.
Maybe its like country bumpkins without street smarts, maybe they just havent learned the defenses needed?
https://ledger.humanetech.com - to see the cumulative damage, engagement maximizing social networks/news media are doing.
I would like to see a study using the same subjects but check to see if they can tell what is a Google search result and what is an ad.
I hope this is not the case for your dad and I'm sorry if I scared you, but you could consider having him checked.
Fear seems to come on as people see people their age dying of various diseases, etc. Mortality is staring them in the face.
And though it starts with the fear, everything that panders to fear follows....
I wonder: could an aging population endanger democracy by not being able to distinguish truth from falsehood?
Just poking fun.
It might be worth considering what interventions people make with problem gamblers. I suspect if those interventions would work for people in your situation too.
The part I fear most is that healthy dose of skepticism that most people used to have is being turned against those people. If you're not with us, you're against us. Nope, that's a false dichotomy. My father doesn't know what a false dichotomy is. That wasn't something he was taught in grade school or business school. That is something I was taught.
I think the best thing we can do is not argue with the older generation about the subject matter itself, but simply arm them with the tools to find flawed arguments in the subject matter. If you're reading this, and you're not familiar with the concept of logical fallacies, that's a good place to start because fake news is almost always built on logical fallacies that are easy to disassemble once you can spot them:
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/15-logical-fallacies-kno...
Once everyone has the tools to debate effectively, then we can have civilized discussions about the actual subject matter itself.
That is my fear as well. "Believe nothing," would be the wrong takeaway from all this, but I'm afraid a cynical population of our youth might very well be following that course.
Be skeptical of skepticism too I tell my daughters.
Unfortunately, that led to cynicism, "analysis paralysis" and other forms of intellectual and (for lack of a better word) spiritual exhaustion.
It's hard to believe in anything that, when you really break it down and analyze it is wrong in so many ways. And that applies to virtually everything, in all honesty. There are no perfect answers.
It's important, though, to believe in something. You're right that we are seeing that cynicism turned from apathy to destruction and hate.
I think a great case study in how to ask questions while still believing in building something positive is the show, The Good Place. The specific episode, "Jeremy Bearimy" deals with how you pick up the pieces from realizing that nothing matters, everything is a mess and humanity is deeply flawed.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/
"Our research suggests that the cognitive process supported by the vmPFC may play a role in older adults’ susceptibility to scams."
I had an epiphany in mid-November 2018. I realized that, despite watching and reading the news on a pretty much daily basis, none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news with such regularity and granularity. This isn't to say that I'm set in my ways and never change my viewpoint. Rather, I think it's more a reflection on the fact that political candidates don't tend to change much over short periods of time, so after a certain point watching or reading the news will simply reaffirm what you already know about them rather than introduce fundamentally new information. A politician who had viewpoint X or trait Y yesterday probably still has viewpoint X today or trait Y today; that may not be true in 5 years, but I don't need to be plugged in every single day.
I realized I only really need to "check in" periodically and see if the voting landscape has truly changed. When "checking in," I've found I have far less allegiance to a particular source and am more open to checking several and comparing. When you don't follow a particular source almost religiously and only peek in once a week or once every two weeks, the "circus" nature of the media starts becoming alarmingly apparent. The disparity between the calm of real life and the 24/7 chaos and tragedy of the news becomes impossible to ignore. My voting patterns have not changed as a result of my disengagement, but my anxiety/outrage/uneasiness have all went down significantly. I now view my previous habit of watching the media every day as a downright unhealthy addiction.
???
Why would a voting decision change based on what you see on the news? Your senator or representative has little to do with the guy who killed his kids and wife last night.
WATCHING news will only get you the extreme stuff. That's how they keep eyeballs. For instance, we know a lot more about Kashoggi than we know about the prime minister that MBS kidnapped. That's because, as horrible as this may sound, the Kashoggi story had more "sizzle" for lack of a better term. This even though the prime minister being kidnapped actually did more to upset the global order.
I'm not exactly sure what @Brakenshire meant, but I suspect they are saying to ignore the 24 hour news channels and stick to the news formats that aren't trying to break news as it happens. For example, Axios has been consistently good. NYT, Washington Post, etc long form stories that are published when the research is done, not when a deadline is up.
Either way, avoid the opinion section and at least stick to news that fact checks against two reliable sources. For example, that would eliminate most programs on Fox News, nearly all of Breitbart, etc.
What you see on blogs is no more reliable than what you see on FOX, which itself is no more reliable than what you see on youtube. It's pretty much all rubbish a lot of the time.
So yeah, you stay away from mainstream media, then you'll likely be consuming "shocking", and just as fake, media from some other source instead. That's just the preponderance of what's out there unfortunately. No avoiding it really.
Thinking about it game theoretically, it's probably smarter just to accept that there is fake media out there, and go ahead and consume media from whatever your favored sources are with that caveat in mind.
ie - It's fine to watch mainstream media. Certainly FOX, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC etc are all no worse than reading or watching anything else. Certainly no worse than anything you see on youtube. But you should "buy" stories like you'd "buy" anything else...
Caveat Emptor.
Depends on the quality of the sources. It's been my experience that, "evidence", and "sources" that blogs and mainstream media cite is oftentimes completely ridiculous. Mainstream media will cite a blog, or a blog will cite a youtube video. "Studies" are cited that are not peer reviewed. Even the "peer reviewed" studies are riddled with errors. Don't even get me started on things like the late unpleasantness involving the Intelligencer, barely science at all, and the NYJM, critical to the cite record.
Nowadays we just have to face the fact that there's a lot of garbage out there. It's just the world we live in now. So consume it, but be aware of what it is you're getting. Most of it is in no way reliable information.
Having a source only makes a story about 1% more credible, but having a dubious/non existent/fake one is a good indication the story shouldn't be trusted.
Short form journalism I ignore, or seek the primary source (like a president’s speech or similar).
I like the distinction you put here, as I've found most "long form" journalism to be focused on superficial details and to try to emphasize innuendo and rumor into emotional plays rather than focusing on facts. As soon as I hit a physical description of one of the people involved that covers more than a sentence (when the article isn't covering a topic involving a physical description), I know the author isn't focused on the parts I care about.
Which is a shame, as there is plenty of investigative journalism that benefits from deeper coverage. Just a lot fewer people doing it. (likely as a consequence of fewer people caring enough to make it financially viable, to properly place blame, but from my end I want the material, not to place blame)
Magazines == Get the big picture on a broad range of topics.
Books == Get the full picture on specific topics.
Looking at things this way I have come to realize that most news I used to read doesn't add any empirical value to me. Sure I can show off I know this and that and that happened and how stupid is that and laugh at it. But that's about it. News (cable news) is literally entertainment IMHO.
No. You'll get a well informed point of view but it's still just a single persons point of view.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-12-23/fed-s-onc...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/world?pid=20601087&sid=afi7TJ...
That was not only hard work, but given that most financial media tends to avoid biting the hand that feeds it, uncommonly gutsy. One of the best examples of investigative journalism I'm aware of.
Sarcasm aside, I do agree that journals and other longer period periodicals are more reliable.
/s
The Internet was such a monumental shift in how society and civilization as a whole functions, and in such a small amount of time, that unless you grew up with it, it should be expected that whole swaths of demographics have no idea how to successfully navigate it (especially when there's next to zero centralized resources on its many pitfalls).
I know he didn't have that kind of personality before. It's quite shocking.
And yes. I'm worrying to become like him one day.
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
If someone’s hobby is pretending to be an asshole or stupid... they might actually just be an asshole or stupid.
—Dorothy Sayers
That’s twice this thread I’ve seen this Vonnegut quote as a thought-terminating cliche, which is two times too many. If you want to have a deeper discussion on the effects of irony on a community, by all means let’s do so. What we should not do is reduce the entire thing down to a pithy mess of fake profundity based on the fame of its speaker, that would be shouted down as the unsubstantiated conclusion it is, if any one of us said it.
I think some people are just wired to think that way and, as we get older, some people switch to thinking that way. As I get older, I get more concerned that whether or not I mentally decline in one way or the other is just random chance and genetics.
The study refutes that statement. I'm not saying we're invincible, I'm just saying we're less susceptible.
Anyways, afa mental decline with age goes, some of it is random, some of it is genetics, some of it is lifestyle that is 100% in your control.
The more you read about the world, the better things stick in your head, the more connections you make, and the more you know. If you leave the critical thinking to some internet celebrity with no incentive to be credible, you end up being coddled from a lot of the news and get basic facts wrong.
I find this incredibly uncomfortable that the OP and you are attributing the spreading of fake news to ageism. No, I don't believe so. Since your evidence is an anecdote, I have many many more anecdotes to disapprove that assessment.
While the GP's thoughts may be anecdotal, the study is not. Whether or not that makes you "uncomfortable" is irrelevant. Have you found issues with the study in question?