It's a good step, but what the US needs the most at the moment is a stronger education system. Most of what we're seeing today is really just a symptom of a deeper issue.
This seems more like an emotional intelligence problem than anything else.
Degrees are often conflated with education. People need to be able to think critically, something that is only partially practiced at a modern institutions. There's plenty of people who can tell you the facts of some field without being able to explain what a theory is, or how evidence works.
No, most conspiracy theories are based on ignorance or fallacious reasoning as well as mistaking cynicism for reason or critical thinking.
People in power, in the West, are disproportionately lawyers with humanities skills, or business types with no skills (lol). As our society increasingly fails, knowledge of math and science is increasingly important to convey truth. Politicians have long repeated repeated what experts tell them (when they are telling the truth), but now that they are repeating something they cannot well understand themselves, it just comes us stale / on faith alone.
> Lawyers are paid to defend their clients. Every politician is a lawyer by trade.
No, that would be true if "people paid to defend their clients are Lawyers". Lawyers offer a specific service to client, distinct from bodyguards and others who provide defense.
Politicians do want to get reelected, but there are many ways for that to be.
Nothing about politics is inherently sublimely, or sleazy things like ALEC inevitable. It rather the due to very specific problems in the US such as terrible voting systems.
> This is the expected result, anyway
To whom?
A lot of this, I think, is driven by people badly wanting or not wanting things to be true. Religious history is another good spot where you can see highly-trained researchers buy into their community's biases, but in the last many years, we've gotten better as a society at acknowledging that religion is the sort of thing that can go sour like this. We haven't gotten good at acknowledging this about other forms of allegiance to a community. Most of the QAnon stuff is driven by patriotism gone sour, and with the benefit of hindsight, we've absolutely seen historians write to fit their worldviews, but we're not as good at seeing it in real time, when it matters.
Never mind that theory alone and statistics alone are both recipes for bias (either flat out fictional narratives (Freud) or p-hacking and over fit crap (bad science).
At least when we erred on the side of theory, it was more "catchy" and better fit our narrative brains. Theory-based truths also derive more from subject-matter-specific reasoning, whereas statistics based truths derive more from subject-matter-agnostic reasoning.
I started reading this https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou.... It does seem like Ulrich Beck was on top of lots of this stuff first.
And yes, that's more or less exactly what logic is in a sense... except the people I'm talking about skip the part about checking the base premises they are building their argument on - because they so badly want to arrive at a specific conclusion.
I don't know the answer. I don't know how you get people in general to plow through emotional reactions first and then give in to them only after a thoughtful process.
Education seems to help though, and lacking some other solution it seems a reasonable thing to focus on. Yet even that is now more of a political issue than it has ever been.
You need both the skills and the desire to seek the truth versus accepting whatever information galvanizes your preexisting belief and value systems. High hill to climb.
People believe what they want. I’ve seen many smart successful programmers spouting off crazy conspiracy theories.
Quite the contrary, many successful people believe they and they alone are responsible for their success, despite their contribution being less than that of others.
https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm (Control-F “How common are mental illnesses?”)
Your statement was "People believe what they want."
You're both saying the same thing.
You and I could easily weave conspiracy using ordinary facts.
People who can't think critically never believe in conspiracy theories. They believe the official story every time.
I've never understood this argument against conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate form of critical thinking.
I don't disagree with you, I'm just stopping right here. Like you said, it's a requirement. So contrarians are more likely to have it.
It's just a technical truth. It doesn't mean they're more likely to be right or that they have a better grip on reality. They just have one of the prerequisites, so they're more likely to have the thing.
Are there no conspiracies? Are all conspiracy theories necessarily untrue?
I don't really care about the group analysis stuff. Not gonna apply that kind of reasoning to anyone I come across.
Despite knowing the flaw of scientific institutions, I still trust scientists in general for ground truth facts, even when they get things wrong.
Hell, when I follow a known expert lecture and followed the citations for just the first lecture, I found minor errors or discrepancies.
I don't understand the major theories at the gut theories. I don't have degrees or the knowledge needed to understand them. I haven't followed the citations and look at the facts.
And the thing is: nobody in the world have time to follow the citations and see if it match up with what everybody else said, let along actually verify the raw facts and follow the thought process of the original scientists.
That being said. I am pretty sure that the modern world is based on a system of rational thought and technology built on the accumulated knowledge of generations of scientists.
Critical thinking doesn’t mean to never believe authorities. It means to actually be able to judge the evidence and the sources yourself.
People who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their minds. Everything is controlled by some small group that is pulling the strings.
This was believed by a Canadian friend who has a PhD, who is also addicted to Twitter.
Anyone who has the skills to find /pol/ and interact on that board has the digital skills needed to find true information. You don't just stumble upon that.
One notable example is climate change. Among Republicans in the US belief in climate change actually declines with increasing education.[2]. Higher education or reasoning facilities don't stop misinformation because misinformation isn't the result of a literal lack of information, it's a rationalisation strategy of adopting fact to preconceived beliefs, and if anything highly educated or capable people are more likely to be able to justify their assumptions.
This even literally shows up in the QAnon slogan which is "question everything". Conspiracy theorists virtually never lack the ability to critically think, if anything they think too critically.
[1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/14/upshot/climat...
People need to understand how to question, investigate, and challenge the sources of information they consume. If we can't do that, in the US or otherwise, then we are doomed.
Right now, they absolutely do discriminate on the information they feed me - most of that discrimination comes in the form of "Did the author of the information pay us?"
I shudder to think of what a world will look like, where the only things known to the public are things that their authors paid for. That'll certainly be a great improvement to the status quo.
People wring their hands over the fifty cent army, but I suppose the five-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-day political ad spend is just something we get to shrug our shoulders at.
To sum it up like that reduces both the enormity and complexity of the problem they are faced with. You say you get spammed with Trump ads; how many of those ads make claims that you could prove are irrevocably untrue? Politicians and people designing political ads are often experts at dancing in the "gray area" of truth.
I don't think it is fair to deny the fact that Facebook takes this problem very seriously, certainly beyond what would be expected from them as far as business obligations go. (I'm even saying this as someone building a product that would compete with them.)
May be more of a psychographic than demographic reason.
I would hesitate to say this. There have been emergences of qanon adjacent conspiracies popping up out of tiktok, the Wayfair one being the most obvious example.
> Most of what we're seeing today is really just a symptom of a deeper issue.
Well, a whole cascade of deeper unresolved issues, plus a very modern Bernays-derived system for injecting nonsense into people and getting them to proliferate it.
http://careymorewedge.com/papers/Scopellitietal2015BiasBlind...
Education may help, but it needs to be focused specifically on bias blind spot reduction. There is some evidence mindfulness training is effective. Mindfulness is presently not taught in traditional education.
https://medium.com/inclusion-insights/mindfulness-bias-liter...
What does "smart" mean then? You write like everyone knows what the definitions are of the words you use, but the way you use them makes it clear that they all need to be defined before any understanding could happen.
I am completely apathetic about expert opinion and "studies" when I get a glimpse of some sort of community that just assumes everybody agrees on axioms and definitions.
I remember spending a lot of time reading about the reptile conspiracy, 9/11 conspiracies. I actually spent a lot of time seriously considering whether some of this information was true.
The internet turned me into an atheist inspite of growing up in a religious setting.
Blogs on the internet were much more aware of the impending financial crash in 2008 and the fact that Iraq did not have WMD.
It takes a while of using the internet to learn how it works and the fact that any random lunatic can start a blog.
My heuristic these days is that 80 % of mainstream opinion is true.
The real world is quite complex and the internet is wonderful for doing your own research.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...
This is QAnon's very first post.
https://i.imgur.com/ycdpCmS.png
Can you point me to any NY Times article that is even remotely close to this level of BS?
Clearly marking it, might be. Much like you can buy all manner of food supplement, but they don't pretend to be drugs, because they are marked with "efficacy is not clinically proven". (Even if "objectively" some of them are efficacious.)
But this ends up with an unsexy task of picking a conspiracy theory to pieces and marking unconfirmed pieces as such, logic contradictions as such, etc. I'm very grateful to people who take take the time to do that. But definitely there are fewer such people than conspiracy theory outlets.
It might be great to have a central repository of such analyses and refutations, crowd-supplied and peer-reviewed, like Wikipedia. The Lesswrong site could be part of it, but it has its own ...biases. TVTropes can be surprisingly useful for learning about and detecting common narrative devices used to drive the narrative and fiction, as opposed to trying to describe reality. But a level-headed, balanced site with systematic analysis of conspiracy theories either does not exist, not not publicized nearly enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...
It's what the Americans point to when they discuss reforms of their education system - and I am the one saying it's not really that strong, or rather, does not seem to be the actual solution.