Our Problem Is Gullibility, Not Disinformation
danielmiessler.com
danielmiessler.com
Taking the religion example. If you look around the world, most people follow their parents faith.
It seems likely that many have been exposed to other faiths. Do we think that those other faiths seem less credible and so people are seeing through them on some logical basis? Or has their parents/local community's faith simply spent a lot longer on convincing them it's true.
Similarly, the ideas that the author seems to consider dangerous didn't grow in vaccum. I dont think a russian agent could bet his colleagues that he'd get Americans to believe anything they named, like George Washington invented the grilled cheese sandwich.
Buy they don't need to convince people of anything specific, just amplify existing messages like:
Scientists are lying to you about covid.
Which feeds off extensive prep work from "scientists are lying to you about climate change" which is probably the best funded disinformation campaign in history.
And is further reinforced by authority positions in their communities, repeating the disinformation.
The GOP in it's current incarnation can't exist without disinformation, and so they'll fight any attempt to educate their base, and if they fail they'll just disenfranchise the ones that wise up.
As I get older, I dont think its about people really thinking it's true, but more about the consequences of opposing the "truth" that your community, your friends, family, have merged into their identities. If you look it it through network effects, virtue signaling, social status, adopting the communal view of the world will have more benefit to their every day lives than taking a rational view of the world.
If the people around me were convinced the sky was orange, and they determine my status, my access to community, my job, my safety net, I would think maintaining their trust in me as more important than proving to them and myself the sky was actually blue. Our human needs are much more immediate than science and facts.
Even science faces these communal effects, needing new generations that arent tied into that network to push forward true revolutionary ideas.
Because I'm pretty sure that when "scientists" (not all of them but those in power) suddenly flipped from saying masks did nothing to masks are essential, the justification given was that they had previously been lying but now didn't need to anymore. So the statement is unambiguously true, if taken over the entire course of events.
Moreover, I think most people are too smart to believe that whether COVID-19 is spread at protests depends on the views of those who are protesting, but plenty of scientists have made exactly that claim too. They were quite clearly lying.
The idea that scientists never lie is the biggest lie of all. Of course they lie. They routinely write fraudulent papers and hope nobody tries to replicate them, but there's also the issue that lying isn't binary. There's a big spectrum between full honesty and lying, with a big area of murky intellectual practices in the middle, practices like woeful exaggeration, cherry picking, abusive citations (e.g. citing a document in support of a statement that doesn't actually support that statement) and all the other problems that meta-science writers complain about.
If society accepted that scientists don't actually have better souls than politicians, business owners or journalists then we'd already be a long way towards solving the gullibility problem.
As for climate change, well, the whole ClimateGate thing did involve destruction of emails by researchers and then lying about it: to the British Parliament, no less! Even the Guardian bailed out at that point. Again, the idea that scientists can and do lie isn't some disinformation campaign. It's obvious and true.
Maybe the solution is to gradually make learning as accessible, inexpensive and beneficial as possible.
Do we, or are the diagnostic criteria of PTSD so broad that the disorder is being massively over-diagnosed?
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586
In general, individual students vary widely in their receptiveness to education of any kind. A lot of them are just "seat fillers" who barely pay attention and are only there out of fear of the negative consequences of nonattendance. It's incredibly difficult to get through to them. In this world where information is easily available everywhere, at your fingertips, ignorance is a deliberate choice.
The formative years of a child are almost completely under control of the parents. It's a chicken and egg problem, because it's difficult to change the public education policy without the consent of the parents who themselves were not raised to think critically. There's near universal agreement that math education is important, but "critical thinking" is controversial at best among parents. A lot of them would rather home school their kids than allow exposure to different ways of thinking.
It reminds me of a study: many groups undertake a turn-based team game in which the prize grows until a certain maximum. Make it to the end of the game: everyone takes an equal part of the prize home. At any point before the end, the entirety of the current prize can be claimed by one individual. Not in one single group was the prize shared. There was always at least one person who waited long enough to claim more than what would have been shared otherwise.
Is knowing the possible colors of squirrel fur an innate trait, or is it something that is learned?
I agree, critical thinking is difficult to teach directly. I can't tell the child-- or an adult for that matter-- to foretell something he doesn't know. The focus of Education is knowledge in various fields like politics, history, physics, mathematics, linguistics, etc.
I was an academic as well. Some classes were certainly funded, maintained and encouraged because of ignorance or political reasons. The entire educational system were I live was reformed based on political reasons. The pilot study in numerous schools failed miserably 20 years ago. The results were never shared with the public before its nation wide implementation. The reform is still in place today. The only copy of the evaluation I know of is a university library and was printed by the professor who was its director and who was subsequently demoted. This happened in a G8 country. Universities are far from immune from selfish or poor decision making.
Try telling the 100000+ homeless students in NY that ignorance is a deliberate choice. Maybe it is a deliberate choice for those in power to dictate others' ignorance. It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.
When I was a student, I remember not being particularly interested in listening to TA drones regurgitate empty words either, especially when I was sleepy.
Let's not lose sight of the subject of the article, which is disinformation, promulgated for example via Facebook and Twitter. There's no evidence that this issue is correlated with homelessness. In fact the people who eat up the disinformation tend to have easy access to internet and television. If homelessness were the problem, then solving homelessness would solve disinformation, but there's no reason to think that's the case. You're more likely to hear internet disinformation repeated in a country club than on the streets.
Lack of financial access to a good education is of course a severe societal problem. But it's not the heart of the matter here, specifically.
> It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.
It's tough, but in my experience the people who work full time and go to school simultaneously tend to be the most motivated. They want to learn, even if they struggle to find the time, otherwise they'd just drop out. The laziest students are often the ones with plenty of free time, which they spend on partying, sports, and other leisure as opposed to studying.
However, as I suggested in another comment, college is probably too late to reach most kids. If you don't start working on them earlier, they're already set into a lot of bad attitudes and habits.
Of course, but not sure how that's relevant here.
> The article unfairly refers to a "nation of idiots".
Not sure that's unfair.
> What is the solution?
What if there is no solution? What if "Idiocracy" was accurate? Or "Planet of the Apes"? Science "fiction" is rife with stories about how humanity ended up destroying itself, especially via technology. It's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time.
The relevance is fairly obvious in my previous comments. See the child who knows of squirrels example. Here is an excerpt from the article that speaks for the relevance:
"For people, patching means education. And not the worker-prep kind of education where you learn how to be an obedient and productive office worker, but the kind that teaches the fundamentals of how things work—from physics to psychology, and from physiology to philosophy."
> Not sure that's unfair.
Many people grow up in terrible conditions and are never given a proper chance to acquire a decent education. It's not especially fair or helpful to insult them.
> What if there is no solution? What if "Idiocracy" was accurate? Or "Planet of the Apes"? Science "fiction" is rife with stories about how humanity ended up destroying itself, especially via technology. It's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time.
Possibilities aren't definitive. Promoting hopelessness and fortune telling doesn't seem very appealing. It leads to negative outlooks and self-fulfilling prophecies that aren't in anyone's interest.
Hasn't it become painfully obvious by now that the upper class is full of "idiots" too? There's a kind of smug complacency that can arise from being comfortable. One is never forced to question one's assumptions.
You keep trying to pivot to poverty, but there's little reason to think that's the problem. I attended a well-regarded high school in a fairly wealthy suburb, and the ratio of "seat fillers" was about the same there as you'd see anywhere else. It just seems to be human nature, a normal distribution.
I'm not saying every education is the same. There are clearly better and worse schools. I'm saying that even when you give everyone in a group the same education, the results still tend to vary widely.
The reason I emphasize "seat fillers" is this: there are a lot of things you can teach a student by forced rote drilling. But it seems to me that critical thinking is uniquely not one of them. Isn't critical thinking the opposite of rote forced drilling? I wonder, then, how much critical thinking can even be taught to unreceptive students.
The problem is deeper. Critical thinking requires you to be willing to engage in criticism. Or phrased another way, it's about skepticism.
Skepticism is deeply unpopular. People who engage in critical thinking are shamed, censored, fired, sometimes punished by the police if their critical thinking leads to them to criticise the beliefs of those in power. There are a lot of people in the world, and especially in the sort of Hacker News reading social groups, who are deathly afraid of critical thinking of any form because they don't believe most people can really do it. They would much prefer blind, automatic belief and credulity.
This article is a prime example of the genre, but you can see this in the way Wojcicki makes YouTube block anyone who doesn't "believe" in the pronouncements of the WHO, even though the WHO has constantly changed its own advice and thus anyone engaged in critical thinking could easily have disagreed with it at any point. LinkedIn has the same policy.
However these people are usually the worst at critical thinking. The author himself is so poor at it that he's spreading misinformation and making loony claims, whilst railing against others he accuses of doing so.
For instance, he provides a list of things Americans supposedly don't believe or believe. He says, "Millions don’t believe in vaccination". What does it mean to "believe" in vaccination? His citation for this is a Washington Post report on polling that actually asked people two rather specific questions:
1. Should vaccination be mandatory? (~33% said no)
2. Is the measles vaccine harmful? (in the west, ~90% said it's safe)
The vast majority of people say no and no, which are the conventional answers. In fact the statement is useless - the population of the US is so large that for "millions" of Americans to believe something requires only 0.5% of the population to believe it, and in this case he isn't even precise about what he means by "believe". When you drill into the actual data it's hardly an issue.
As for "45% of Americans believe in ghosts and demons", does he really believe people will take a poll like that seriously? Only someone incapable of critical thinking would take such a claim at face value. If half of Americans believed in ghosts and demons, there would be a thriving industry of anti-ghost and anti-demonic services. There'd be ghostbusting shops in every town. There aren't, but there sure are a lot of people who will troll pollsters and fools who blindly believe them for a laugh.
Which is not too surprising - people have gotten screwed by faith forever: Uncritical belief of the Church, the State, the salesman or prophet, etc. often leads to the believers' exploitation for the basest of ends.
Which is not to say that killing bullshit once and for all is impossible or an unworthy goal, but it's high effort and messy.
During this pandemic, the deplorables continued to farm and deliver food, keeping us alive while the elites burned our cities down. (Dr. VDH.)
The deplorables voted in Trump because the elites couldn't be bothered enforcing immigration (the wall) or maintaining factory jobs in the USA (outsourcing to China.) (Dr. VDH.)
So I would suggest you develop an understanding of how our country was hollowed out before criticizing the very people the elites destroyed financially.
Regarding religion, at the moment, our young people worship Tinder hookups and Instagram selfies, the twin gods of narcissism, instead of Jesus, resulting in the total destruction of the family unit. How's that working out? (RPMH)
FYI: you sound exactly like the coastal elites that got us into this mess. The California HSR is a perfect example of how worthless they are - all hot air, no rail.
When Trump wins his second election by a landslide, you can refer to this post for the reasons why.
This, especially when the definition of success changes depending on who you ask and at what point in their lives. In the last decade alone I’ve made quite a few reversals.
I will choose the most basic fact on his list. I want to see the author prove that the earth is a sphere by his own observations. I can almost guarantee that no mandated high school curriculum teaches even how to do this, nonetheless asks students to do so. The standard of belief is 'rational' narrative, as in, a story that contains no major contradictions within itself, and for expediency, is not subject to cross-examination. Dogma. If I recall correctly, this question was asked in an astronomy PhD seminar at MIT, and nobody knew how to do it.
So smug is the author in his ignorance. 'Not believing' should be the default. Narratives should be understood as culture, good to know, possibly true, and likely imperfect, but ultimately just a story that may be learned from just like religion or myth, whether true or not. I have a sense that ancient people understood this better than we do today.
His criticism of others is nothing but tribalism. He's not educating in the sense of providing evidence toward a rational conclusion, or even bolstering his own narrative. He's simply labeling other people as lesser than himself. And, to head off any accusations of hypocrisy, to some extent, so am I with him. The point here is that so-called 'knowledge' is an ancient battleground rooted in disparate sets of values. People should know that they are being indoctrinated, and also that it's nearly impossible to survive among other humans without choosing some flavor of that. But it does have implications for your life, whether your own beliefs serve you, harm you, or shames you into serving someone else.
It's simpler than literally dodging a bullet, but that doesn't make it simple.