If we educated everyone on logic and reasoning, then each person could do their own fact checking. I'm pretty sure that if the citizenry isn't capable of doing their own fact checking, they will also be susceptible of falling victim to false/compromised fact-checking systems. This lack of education is, in my view, the root of many problems in the US today and undermines the basis of a legitimate/well founded democracy.
I'm a mathematician, my colleagues are mathematicians, yet a good portion of them don't use logic and reasoning when it comes to news or other non-math Internet information.
The battle is lost..
We're designed to follow people who look like strong leaders - even if they aren't - and to believe simple us/them narratives. Add some shock value for stickiness - like QAnon with its paedophile shtick - and it's a home run for the liars.
We don't have anything resembling a working science of politics and culture, which is why both seem to break so consistently.
No matter what the ideals are supposed to be, cultures are not dynamically stable. As soon as you introduce stressors of any kind - internal or external - humans revert to running on instinct, dark triad types note the weaknesses and start taking advantage of them, and the illusion of stability falls apart.
> It's genetic - we're not designed to think rationally about tribal issues.
> like QAnon with its paedophile shtick - and it's a home run for the liars.
Why? Because the actual truth of these child trafficking rumours is unknown.
But it accentuates your point. There are exceptions here and there, but your initial point seems to be very true: generally speaking, people are literally unable to think logically about many things. And many additional things (that we do not yet understand) are surely layered on top to exacerbate the problem - one I've observed is that the mind seems to have an aversion to the unknown, which plausibly makes sense since the brain arguably evolved to optimize for fast decisions...at times, indecisiveness could be deadly, so a bias against it should be surprising. (Is there any truth to theories like this? Once again, it is largely unknown - at best we typically have a few (unreplicable) psychological studies that hint at it.)
Although, I think all is not lost - while individuals may not be able to do it independently, perhaps more structured crowd sourced approaches could help. I think by decomposing a story down into discrete assertions, each with an epistemic status of some kind (with attached evidence), could go a long way to improving public perception of reality. Whether such an approach is in the interests of powerful people seems questionable.
You may notice that the public discourse on important issues tends to take the form of a meme war (battle of mini-narratives repeated over and over), as opposed to a singular comprehensive document summarizing what is known, highlighting portions that are unknown or disputed (with competing arguments). Are meme wars how one would run a complex software project? Not me. But why do we run the planet this way? And why can nobody notice?
For some answers to that last question....some people have complex theories to explain why people can't seem to think straight, this one is a bit deep but quite interesting. My very rough take is that our perception of reality largely consists of or is shaped/defined by the ideology we have been raised in, and as a result we simply can't "see" objective reality itself.
Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtIckkHsUQ4
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18912.The_Sublime_Object...
I assume you are already familiar with it, since you are quoting Zizek, but Noam Chomsky has a pretty convincing theory about this, "the propaganda model", discussed in his book "Manufacturing Consent".
Also Century of Self by Adam Curtis and many other documentaries. The reality of the situation spans so many disciplines (psychology/neurology, evolutionary theory, history, government, geopolitics, and so forth and so on) that getting a solid handle on what is actually true is impossible, but with the right effort and style of thinking it's not difficult to form a reasonable conclusion that the actual state of reality is quite different than the way it is advertised and perceived by the masses, which seems to me like a good epistemic position to work from.
Funny how everyone who's saying something like this is always sure they belong with the smart ones
Out of (say) 5~12 "values" that might matter to most persons - they are in different order, and change the way we process data. To provide a simple example, some people value freedom (autonomy) over safety, and others value safety over autonomy.
So even if people share the same assumptions about how the world works - and they have the same ideology as their tribe - disagreements will still arise.
For me the biggest problem is discovering/finding (often accidentally) where I need to introspect and/or drill-down.
It doesn't occur to me to examine unexamined assumptions - at all. It's like a blind-spot until one-day: Bam! "You need to go verify this assumption!" (Or conclusion or chain-of-reasoning or theory or whatever)
That's not to say that we always agree about the facts, only that the reason we disagree about the facts can usually be traced to a disagreement over values. When we do agree on values, factual questions become a technical problem -- which education could theoretically solve.
I think the solution is to have faith in plurality and be less worried that someone, somewhere has different values than us. There is a line but I don't think we're close to crossing it.
K-12 education is not so blanketly "sorry". basic literacy has been at 99% for decades. could it be better? potentially. obviously so? not really, at least not to a sufficient level of consensus.
with that said, i'd love to see rationalism (not just logic, but also inductive reasoning) taught and honed throughout primary/secondary school to improve our collective abilities to discern and deconstruct narratives of all kinds.
But how, I ask? I don't know, but it works for me, she says
Yes, education in general, such as the PhDs you mention, would not necessarily be helpful in this. The current education system tries to teach logic and argument implicitly through assignments dealing with other subjects. Unfortunately, I think this can lead to the inclusion of biases such as teachers being bias towards answers that agree with their own. For example, in third grade I said a bath is more water efficient than a shower because you could reuse the water in the tub for other purposes and you don't need to fill it as high as most people do. My answer was marked wrong because they were basing the answers off the stereotypical ideas of baths and showers.
Assuming we can somehow defer peoples personal responsibility on logic and reasoning and _not_ have it be exploited / corrupted in the future is a hell of an assumption. It feels to me on par with the Government asking for backdoors to encryption.
It definitely is not working now but that's not a supporting argument for the impossibility of an educated population. It's an argument against the current education infrastructure. Which, by most accounts, is flawed - some would say entirely broken.
However, to your point, it's not a class and it's not required. So participation in debate ends up being very low among the population of all students.
Simply let some time pass people will get better at detecting bs once they've encounter too many lies. Same way this generation is better than the previous one.
A lot of the conspiracy theorists who have at least average intelligence become that way because they recognize the inconsistencies in mainstream views. Having to deal with the world as it is, and with imperfect information, seems to be difficult for some of the most logical people.
I think it would be better to expose people to more facts, more of history, more of science, so they get a better understanding of the range of what's likely to be true. Beyond that, people need to be exposed to people from other cultures, other groups so that it becomes harder to believe rumors about them or see them as some monolithic entity.
I mean, just look at the gender wage gap. Even the president (Obama at the time) misrepresented the wage gap at the state of the union and almost all of the media went along with it. The wage gap has been demonstrated by the BLS study (fact), but was being misused to influence to population to believe that men make about 20% more than women in the same job, all else equal.
Also, even if the rational choice is to not trust anyone, that doesn't make it the reasonable choice. I think many people would make the reasonable choice to "trust but verify".
Even a reliable source, like an academic article or a nationally syndicated newspaper, can be wrong, and are, frequently. Basic logic and rationality would be enough for people to realize that "I saw it on Facebook" has basically no informational value.
If anything, therefore it is the "reliable" sources which should be fact-checked, since they have greater credibility and influence, and because no one with any sense would believe something just because they saw it on Facebook and Twitter.
The fact that many people appear to do so says, to me, that when people are on Facebook and Twitter, they really don't care about the truth of the matter, they are looking for things to fit their confirmation bias. Therefore we would expect "fact checking" on such platforms to accomplish very little, except for irritating people who are semi-consciously already aware that they are consuming right-wing propaganda, and see left-leaning propaganda as informationally equivalent, just a product for a different audience.
A lot of misinformation, I would guess the vast majority, starts from false "facts" but builds logically on those. "Rea searchers have found that vaccines cause autism, so we should avoid vaccines for mild or unlikely diseases, lest our children catch autism" - the reasoning is pretty sound, except that the "fact" it starts from is an utter lie.
Now, I would still say that, rather than silencing these opinions, it is more important for them to be combated at every opportunity, with the real truth, which is indeed a form of education.
Also, educated people ON THE SUBJECT MATTER often disagree about things. Just look at Supreme Court rulings.