Seeking Truth in a Time of Misinformation | Hacker News Reader

Seeking Truth in a Time of Misinformation

raphlinus.github.io

62 pointscrawshaw51 comments

A significant part of the problem is social media technology and our relationship with it. The platforms encourage low effort hot takes and gamify narcissistic tendencies (likes, karma, rts, friends, followers). Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible. It fosters divisiveness and tribalism at an amazing scale.

I'd wager in a world without Twitter, Facebook, et al we'd have a healthier & stronger society. Humans aren't meant to communicate this way and numerous studies show the physiological toll on the individual and we are all witnessing the societal toll play out in front of us.

On top of that, like being in cars, it lobotomizes our empathy towards those we're interacting with, creating the perfect storm of toxic interaction.

My thoughts on this are that we are in a period of

Low friction to create content => cheap, easy, mass volumes of content

AND no curation based on accuracy, scientific rigor, and truthfulness.

In fact the curation is biased heavily towards content which makes the reader strongly feel something. Outrage, joy, sadness... They acknowledge those feelings by sharing, tweeting, liking, upvoting. All measured by the proxy metric "engagement".

"Engagement" is the enemy in these issues as while it symbolizes usage to a social media company trying to blitz scale, in actuality it symbolizes content that made someone feel a strong emotion and NOT content that is accurate, truthful, and scientific.

Everyone is optimizing for content to go viral in order to get eyeballs on it and that automatically means content skewed to generate outrage, sadness, or joy. And as the competitions heats up, the content has to become even further optimized for feelings generation in order to win out over other similarly skewed content.

This is why social media unintentionally became one of the biggest problems that truth and science has ever faced.

Social media, if anything, played a positive role and showed its strengths. Thanks to early warners, some people managed to keep their sanity, some others found flaws in studies, some others were warning people while the media was being partisan, some others taught people how to behave while government and the media were delirious about going/not going to protests/rallies etc. The "media of record" will never admit it, but the internet/social media proved that "access to multifaceted information" dominates over "parroting the elites". People are learning to distrust the mainstream elites, and that's a good thing.

> Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible.

Of course this is impossible if the other party is not interested, but the format doesn't prevent engagement. The problem is that this engagement takes work and is rewarded less than the "hot takes" you describe.

The literature on trust metrics that Raph has made a contribution to does suggest that the gamification can be tuned to reward constructive interactions. Given the recent advertiser boycott of Facebook, it is possible that there is now an incentive for applying these ideas in the context of popular social metrics.

Prevent might be too strong a description, but discourage deeper engagement while radically facilitating the opposite?

> can be tuned

Sure, maybe. But thus far they haven't been. I'm a bit dubious that intentional interventions wouldn't also have their own substantial negative effects.

Our online communications platforms have a much greater effect on many people than a great many drugs that we only make available by prescription do... yet we've tapped in most of the country to them on a 16-hour a day central line drip feed before we ever really began studying their effects.

> But thus far they haven't been.

They haven't been because the social media platforms have been chasing engagement as their only target and that favours toxicity. But many advertisers are allergic to toxicity: there may be space for a social media platform that tries to avoid the toxic forms of engagement.

> I'm a bit dubious that intentional interventions wouldn't also have their own substantial negative effects.

The current system has been shaped by intentional interventions. The alternative regime should be judged relative to the status quo.

I recommend Richard Seymour's 'The Twittering Machine' on the nature of those intentional interventions; cf. review: https://www.rs21.org.uk/2019/11/16/review-the-twittering-mac...

I’d like to make a similar argument for traditional mass media.. Readers don’t get to have nuanced discussions with content producers (journalist,editors,etc). This leads to not necessarily prosocial tendencies exhibited in, eg, the NYT doxxing of SSC or Vice not doing Naomi Wu a solid. Perhaps this is what Taleb may ascribe to a lack of skin in game? In the social web there is however the possibility of getting burned by the mob, so hmmmm.

Continuing on that thought - gamification of social media is a mechanism of mass manipulation. I think the author’s intent is to create resiliency. Kudos!

Thank you, this is an important and timely article. If, however, you believe that only one faction is anti-truth, you are blind or willfully dissonant.

I probably could have worded that a bit more clearly. I was trying to make the argument that there is an anti-truth faction and that this faction is currently in a much stronger alliance with the right. I'm under no illusions that it's exclusive to the right, though, and was thinking of adding a section on anti-vax to clarify this.

In any case, I wanted to stay away from reflexive both-siderism as I've most often seen it used as a bad faith argument.

As someone who agrees in sentiment with GP (but leans similarly to you), I thought you communicated that well enough in the article. For what little my opinion's worth.

Nowadays anti-vaccinantion is substantially a marker for being on the right, since Donald Trump ran for president while making anti-vaccination claims. This tremendously increased the popularity of antivax ideas on the right.

See "Donald Trump and vaccination: The effect of political identity, conspiracist ideation and presidential tweets on vaccine hesitancy" in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

Respect

If you believe that the political right and political left in America are equally anti-truth—or even within a few orders of magnitude—then you are the one who is willfully blind.

For 2 decades now, the right wing has been selling lies to build anger and get votes. It's well-documented and easily provable. The left wing (such as it is) has politicians who do what politicians do—which is to say, some of them are incapable of telling the truth to save their lives, while others are genuinely people of integrity trying to make things better—but they have absolutely not had anything like the kind of concerted effort to erase truth from existence in service of their own short-sighted ends.

And the "even-handed" approach you are attempting to perpetuate is—again, demonstrably—a huge contributor to letting the Republicans get away with their many lies.

Ugh it’s not helpful to make judgments without substantiation. This post is just contributing to the echo chamber and I can’t let you get away with it. It’s not constructive.

I would like some comments on this:

I have been grappling with how to discuss issues related to covid as truthfully as possible, and I’m wondering if anyone disagrees.

My intuition as a physicist says that any discussion or comparison of covid effects that look at total numbers, while true, is less meaningful than looking at these numbers normalized by population size.

Both sets of numbers are true, both lead the intuition to different conclusions. What conclusion should the intuition land on?

Isn’t it strange that people can argue behind truthful data to lead people to completely different conclusions?

Both sets of numbers are meaningful, for understanding different parts of the problem. The spread of an infectious disease like Covid-19 is not a virus moving through a relatively homogeneous population, but rather the overlay of a lot of small outbreaks. Early on, when the total number of cases is small, absolute numbers are most meaningful as a basis for comparison. [1] is a thread from Mar 29 (from the brilliant visualization expert John Burn-Murdoch) arguing that absolute numbers are more predictive of "death toll one week after 10th death" and that normalizing by population only makes smaller countries look worse.

But as the spread continues (a process which takes time), per-capita numbers make sense. Mr. Burn-Murdoch revised his position (see [2] for a podcast with transcript where he talks about his thinking), and now the FT graphs have a normalized option (though their focus has moved on to other metrics such as excess mortality).

Carl Bergstrom also has a great thread [3] where he talks about the choice, concluding that both are valid as long as you're careful about context.

HTH

[1]: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244380095164420101

[2]: https://voices.media/transcript-john-burn-murdoch-senior-dat...

[3]: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1249930293928030209

It sounds like we would ideally have a geographical heat-map overlaid on to every county in America that was per-capita based.

Then, even small numbers in an initial outbreak are meaningful because you aren’t dividing by the population of the world.

This would also let local policy makers and citizens gauge risk levels.

It seems to me that the media scared everyone in the country in March/April based on what was happening in NYC, and now people are numb to any recommendations.

This miscommunication cost us dearly.

Often when I see numbers instead of percentages in these discussions, I can’t help but think it’s intended to manipulate the reader and that the percentage wouldn’t evoke the same emotional reaction.

It makes sense to me (B.S. Physics, 2010) it’s easy to tell arbitrary stories with quantities defined up to a constant.

This author is mostly on to it. However, I'm hearing the dog that is not barking.

We hear about listening to the science when it comes to COVID-19 and climate change. I totally agree. Why not also listen to the science when it comes to police shootings? And about whether George Floyd protesters further spread the virus or magically spookily didn't? We hear about criticism of the CDC, and I concur. Why not also admit the WHO made a long series of dangerous misstatements to such a degree that it's gotten hard to believe they were just accidents?

IMHO the right-wing is leading the way in conspiracy theories and downright dangerous viewpoints. On this we agree. But the left-wing legacy media has its fair share of fake news as well, especially in continually to mischaracterize statements made by Trump, and in framing the narrative in extremely unhelpful ways. Why not report actual death statistics regarding race relations? Why is it never news when a black police officer shoots a white person? Our brains make inferences based on frequency of events, but the events we are bombarded with are biased in a way to lead us to wrong politically-motivated conclusions, time and time again.

I'd like to think I'm in the middle. At the very least, I try to heap criticism on everybody. I'd like to see reasonable people to converge in the middle, en masse, and break America out of this dangerous partisan death spiral. This author is clearly reasonable, and on the right track, but seems to still be too much living in the main left-wing bubble and/or too afraid to criticize the left.

I've dug further into this and have become less impressed. I'll leave just one example (I had many but I won't hog this space).

Apparently this is "high end science journalism". Kai Kupferschmidt tweets this "Some people in the US actually seem to think that rising #covid19 cases won’t lead to rising deaths eventually. It’s like they are watching lightning flash across the sky thinking the thunder won‘t come crashing."

Cases don't measure infections, they measure measured infections. Ramping up testing will ramp up cases even if infections do not ramp up. There is a credible theory that more cases are due to more testing, not due to more infections, and if that is true, the death rate will not follow. I don't personally accept that theory, but it's disingenuous and not "high end science journalism" when you fail to actually address the alternate theory.

This might be a good opportunity to make some distinctions. @kakape is a professional journalist, and his work product is the articles he publishes in Science. The Twitter feed is not the journalism, but is participating in a conversation. I find following Twitter feeds of journalists particularly useful, because they tend to have their ear to the ground about what is interesting, but of course it's no substitute for vetted, edited articles.

That particular tweet resonates poetically for me, and speaks to major themes in my essay. The belief that you can have rising cases and mortality will stay low is, as we speak, a major narrative in what I refer to as "idiot Twitter." What I get from the Tweet is that a basic theoretical understanding of the underlying processes should be enough to dispel the notion. Just as a child might not know that thunder follows lightning, the people espousing this theory do not understand basic epidemiology. It's not a scientific proof that thunder follows lightning, or that there might not be edge cases such as the flash being so far away that the sound dissipates.

Increased testing is absolutely a factor in explaining why we're seeing this puzzling pattern, but doesn't by itself explain what we're seeing. Part of the answer is lead time bias, which from what I can tell is a reasonably obscure epidemiological concept but relevant in this context. Dr. Ellie Murray explains it in this linked "tweetorial":

https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1280305393516904448

Simpson's Paradox is another major factor: to really gain an understanding of what's going on, you need to look at individual states or even finer regional divisions, and aggregating them can obscure important patterns. The effect is especially important these days because different states are very different.

The appeal is to “listen to these people.” Unfortunately intellect doesn’t imply integrity, and appeal to authority is what got America to where it is. I would’ve preferred a framework for critical thinking, or at least more emphasis on that aspect rather than saying “you can trust these people.” That’s what everyone is saying, PhDs everywhere. I have an unfinished PhD too, and I’m saying “find out what makes it tick” and “follow the money”

I had another section on "is this an echo chamber?" that didn't make it into the final version. It would have gone into internal consistency and evolution of thought in the face of evidence as reasonably objective yardsticks. I'm not sure how much I'd be able to accomplish trying to establish a framework for critical thinking in a blog post.

In any case, the message is much more, "I've been paying close attention and have found these people worth listening to," and I don't think "authority" is really the word I'd use to express my criteria. I mean, I had a whole section against authority, and in my penultimate graf I implore readers to do their own critical thinking and not blindly follow.

Some reflections, having slept on it.

I am disappointed but not at all surprised that many of the reactions here are responses to my partisan position. I worked pretty hard to reduce that without compromising what I was trying to say. Certainly in the Twitter list I'm promoting I think I succeeded; it includes Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner under Trump and now advising two Republican governors on Covid-19, but doesn't have anybody (D or R) who uses their platform to push partisan political messages.

But I think the reduction of everything to partisanship is one of the ways in which we're broken. It's impossible to have a productive conversation under those circumstances. I think it's a kind of learned helplessness. We don't want to solve problems ourselves, we want our political party (and institutions in general) to do it. I'm sure many of us on this thread have fantasies of our party vanquishing the other one on the political stage and carrying out our wishes. Or if our party is in power, then we reflexively want to rationalize away whatever flaws they have. (For the record, I am equally upset by what's going on in blue states and red. Seeing the numbers go up in California, where I live, is at odds with any simplistic narrative that Democrats embrace science and Republicans deny it, with direct consequences for Covid response)

In any case, thanks for the responses, they're all respectful, and I appreciate that.

Some more reading on this topic:

- This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality -- Peter Pomerantsev

- A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy -- Nancy L. Rosenblum

- Trust, Facts, And Democracy In A Polarized World [podcast ] https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/pew/

- darknetdiaries EP 65: PSYOP [podcast] https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/65/ (interview with psychological operations worker)

- Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare -- Thomas Rid

I've read that 40% of all deaths as of the first week of June were in elder care homes, a lot of them in NY and NJ where C19 patients were _sent to the nursing homes_. It's not so much a partisan issue as it is absolute shit state government issue. The decision to decimate the elderly was made at the state level, without exception. Governor Cuomo in particular needs to go to jail, in spite of granting himself immunity for this.

What a good example. I heard this claim recently from a family member and decided to look it up. It sounds unbelievable and deeply disturbing that Cuomo would knowingly send infected people to be admitted to nursing homes. The way the story is told, it sounds like he's actually trying to spread the disease and kill old people.

It turns out it's all spin. I'll admit it took quite a bit of digging to get beyond all the nypost/wsj/fox stories spreading misinformation. Yes, Cuomo said a COVID-19 diagnosis was not a reason to exclude patients from returning to a nursing home in March. But also, hospital bed space was absolutely critical during that time. While this was happening, about 25% of the nursing home workforce was infected anyway, and staff seems to have been the primary means of transmission. Also, after a week or so of showing symptoms, it was thought that the patients are no longer infectious to others.

The reason that you, my family, and the right-wing media are going crazy over Cuomo's decision is because Trump is making it a political issue and using this as a talking point. The reality is that Cuomo arguably made the best decision possible at the time, and there wasn't really an alternative. Other states made the same decision at the time, and based on the outbreak numbers we're seeing today, we'll see that decision again in the near future. The only other option was to let hospitals overflow their capacity. Maybe there should have been centers for COVID patients that are released from hospitals, but that's a massive logistical problem to be solved on short notice in the middle of a pandemic.

Cuomo's executive order happened in March. By May, once things were getting under control, Cuomo changed that order, presumably because hospitals now had more capacity to house patients. Take a look at the curve from NY and tell me you could have made a better decision at the time: https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus-ny/

If you want a reason to be outraged at Cuomo, the real scandal here is NY state providing immunity from lawsuits to nursing homes who mishandled the outbreak. The reason you're not hearing outrage about that from right-wing press is that it's also a republican strategy. States across the country are granting lawsuit immunity to protect insurance companies and care facilities.

This is the closest you're going to get to the real story, if you'd like to learn more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/nyregion/nursing-homes-de...

What's "spin" here? 40% of all deaths being in nursing homes? That it's not a good idea to send C19 patients to nursing homes? That NY has three times the death rate of Italy? That states which locked down nursing homes have much lower fatalities? I don't see how you can even begin to argue that Cuomo's handling of the crisis was at least atrocious, if not outright malicious.

> about 25% of the nursing home workforce was infected anyway

The logical thing to do would be to _move them out_, not get that number to 100%.

If this wasn't HN, I'd dismiss you as a troll, but because I think you're legitimately trying to engage here, I'll bite:

> It's not so much a partisan issue as it is absolute shit state government issue. The decision to decimate the elderly was made at the state level, without exception. Governor Cuomo in particular needs to go to jail, in spite of granting himself immunity for this.

This is the spin.

The fact that you're aware of this order being enacted in New York and unaware that the same guidelines existed in 12 other states, including New Jersey, should make it really clear that this is anti-Cuomo spin. Another indication is that searching for "cuomo covid nursing homes" yields almost exclusively right-wing publications of questionable veracity. Also he's a Democrat from New York, and the governor of New York is traditionally a high profile target. Also, at the time the story broke, Cuomo's daily press briefings were seen as competing with Trump's daily briefings. When you add all that together, it's pretty obvious to me that there's going to be some spin here, which doesn't mean the spin isn't true, but it's good to be aware that it's happening.

> 40% of all deaths being in nursing homes? That it's not a good idea to send C19 patients to nursing homes? That NY has three times the death rate of Italy?

I'm not disputing any of that. COVID disproportionately impacts the elderly. Sending patients to any facility not specifically designed for it is a bad idea. I don't know enough about Italy to comment as to why they may have fared better.

> That states which locked down nursing homes have much lower fatalities?

I assume you're talking about places that stood up COVID-only facilities quickly. I think everyone, even Cuomo, knew that this was the best thing to do, but for whatever reasons it couldn't be executed in NY. But as we know, NY wasn't the only state that failed this test. I'm fairly certain Cuomo would have picked separate facilities if that was a possibility and the better option for public health.

> I don't see how you can even begin to argue that Cuomo's handling of the crisis was at least atrocious, if not outright malicious.

Cuomo was a rational actor here, unfortunately.

The problem has at least two significant dimensions:

1) Elder care is for profit, and not having those patients causes a financial loss for the care facilities. This has always been a moral hazard and is why these facilities are known for their poor standards of care. If a facility can figure out a way to cut expense or accept more patients, the facility will make more money. Like many problems, it's always been there, but it's made much worse by the pandemic. I don't know if Cuomo was lobbied to make the decision for care facilities to accept discharged COVID patients, but it is a possibility.

2) There's been a lack of federal leadership on pandemic preparedness. Cuomo's decision was to free up hospital resources by releasing patients back to care facilities. It's hard to fault him for that given the predictions at the time and the very real threat of saturating the entire health care system. Pandemics cross state lines and the federal government should take charge of the situation and ensure a uniform response. The current administration has decided to leave the majority of the response for the states to figure out. Additionally, somewhat famously, the current administration disbanded their pandemic response team: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

I would be super happy if you read this whole comment and think "oh no, maybe i was deceived by disinformation" and take steps to make sure you're less vulnerable in the future. Unfortunately, truth is now partisan, and I don't think you and I will be able to reach a shared truth about what Cuomo did or why. It's particularly disappointing because this is such a clean textbook example of a disinformation campaign.

Also, for what it's worth, I don't even like Cuomo. He just happens to be a legitimate victim of disinformation in this particular instance.

Just look at the difference in mask recommendations between governments over time will give people a feel on how difficult it is to ascertain truths in an evolving epidemic.

There is also the issue of whether the absence of evidence constitutes evidence for absence, notably surrounding the controversies regarding the effectiveness of masks and hydroxychloroquine

Thank you for this excellent post! Out of curiosity, how much time do you spend sifting through COVID-related material every day? Or is it mostly passive (Twitter experts, etc.) at this point?

It goes up and down depending on how busy I am with other things, but aside from keeping on top of Twitter I try to read about a paper a day. I went pretty deep into a few topics, including HCQ and trying to understand the capabilities and limitations of isothermal PCR.

One interesting pattern I found from discussions on HN is that when people cite papers, they very often don't support what the poster seems to be claiming. That's maybe I something I could expand on, because it's similar to cherry-picking but still not quite the same. In any case, I still appreciate the references because often I learn something :)

>One interesting pattern I found from discussions on HN is that when people cite papers, they very often don't support what the poster seems to be claiming.

This is not unique to HN. Heck, often the data in the paper doesn't support the words in the paper! Science is hard.

Presumably most of this applies to the issue of climate change, also.

Yes, and I refer to that at least in passing. I've observed that the political and informational environment around climate change and Covid-19 are basically identical, with the exception of about a couple orders of magnitude of time scale. That gives the opportunity to see how well arguments hold up in more or less real time, which is much less of a luxury with climate change.

I've read this article several times, each time trying to understand what the author want to say, but it's just impossible and the title is completely misleading. For months since all of this started there has been an extremely large division between not just ordinary people, but between people competent enough to discuss the issue like doctors and scientists. To be completely on one side is naive and telling people what the "truth" is is arrogant. Now there is tons of data to be working with and continuing with the narrative that we're in some serious and deadly pandemic is just ridiculous.

Hint: "china" didn't appear in this article.

It did not, because there are many many threads of disinformation and I wasn't trying to catalog them all. I'm happy to engage a discussion of how to avoid misinformation specifically related to China, but not really clear what point you're trying to make here. I also think it's pretty far down on the list of threats we face right now, but understand others may feel differently about that.

You are talking about disinfomation and Covid19 without mentioning the state-of-the-art player: CCP, you won't get it right. This is an advice from a native Chinese.

I'm not knowledgeable enough about the CCP's disinformation efforts to do the topic justice. But if you'd be willing to write something in the same general spirit as my essay, I would be more than happy to link it.

well, they started off actually going to credible sources, telling them to portrait them positively. i don't know of any proof for comment-style disinformation from them, but considering that its basically impossible to prove that.... i'm not sure someone could write a good article about that. its a sad reality we live in, imo.

its also telling that very few published that attempt. i doubt it was only done to germany... others likely went ahead.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german...

This is a fantastic piece. I am going to share it with my students tomorrow.

I disagree strenuously and I believe the piece will be damaging to the intellectual future of your students.

The title is "Seeking Truth" but the author doesn't appear to be doing that. A more accurate title would be "Declaring Truth Without Supporting My Claims!"

- Author makes an extraordinary, vague, unfalsifiable claim that "America is Broken," but does not provide extraordinary or rigorous evidence

- Author makes the further claim that it's all the fault of Republicans, again providing little in the way of evidence

- Author appeals to the authority of science, but doesn't apply the rigor of good science to his own arguments; we are ironically expected to take his own claims on faith

For the most part this article is just another piece of incendiary rhetoric with little compelling evidence of anything, all it adds to the debate is emotion.

The author should narrow the scope of his claims and address opposing viewpoints in good faith if he wishes to construct a credible argument.

If this shit passes for academic nowadays, no wonder a growing number of Americans feel we no longer need academia.

Teach your students a dialectical method instead, where opposing and specific viewpoints are presented with the requirement to make a rational, evidence-based defense of their positions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

"damaging to the intellectual future of your students"

This might be true, if the teaching environment suppresses criticism of material presented. This is not what is supposed to happen, though: materials should be presented as an opportunity for critical evaluation and the multiplicity of views presented by students should provide the dialectical input needed, possibly supplemeted by interjections by the instructor if the students are showing groupthink. This is better that presenting two opposite claims and leaving it to the students to figure out on their own if one of them is correct. (Usually neither is entirely, and in real life, not every pirce of information comes helpfully accompanied by an appropriately matched opposing viewpoint).

You're quick to assume the worst. Why is that?

Not to disagree with your overall point, but Marcuse wrote about plurality as a poor substitute for critical thought in the 60s:

"Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power."

The instructor's interjections provide a look-in here, but the whole presupposition is that the students have learned and sufficiently refined the capacity for critical thought inside and outside the classroom setting.

It is, of course, not any kind of substitute for critical thought. But the GP referenced dialectic by way of arguing for contrary materials to be presented in class: my point was that a living argument among the students is better for teaching dialectic than a curated selection of contrary views. The responsibility of the instructor goes beyond this elementary requirement for ensuring multiple viewpoints are presented.

Pluralism alone works somewhat counter to the original spirit of dissent - it means assent to one of the available groups. Which will ultimately lead to conflict unless mediated, and in conflict, bigger (or louder, or richer) usually wins, and takes all.

That is if you assume that critical thinking is a goal of this educational system, not producing malleable effective work drones cheaply, or the slightly loftier goal of making sure USA stays ahead in advanced technologies.

It has other aims too, like reducing crime indirectly and allegedly making social mobility more possible.

Neither from which critical thinking skills requirement follows directly.

If it were cultivating American spirit of dissent combined with cooperation and multicultural integration, the critical thinking, analysis and reading skills could follow from that. But this seems to have fallen by the wayside...

Dissent without critical thinking leads to quarrel, anarchy and dissolution.

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